movie review of greatest showman

The Greatest Showman

“Without promotion, something terrible happens…nothing!” – attributed to Phineas Taylor Barnum

“The  Greatest  Showman,” directed with verve and panache by Michael Gracey , is an unabashed piece of pure entertainment, punctuated by 11 memorable songs composed by Oscar- and Tony-winning duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul , who composed the songs for “ La La Land ,” as well as the current Broadway hit  Dear Evan Hansen . The film is made for the whole family to enjoy, and so it leaves out many of the darker elements (explored in the 1980 Broadway musical  Barnum , music by Cy Coleman ). This is a difficult tightrope to walk, but credit is due to Gracey, a perfectly cast Hugh Jackman , and the entire cast, who play this story in the spirit in which it was written (by Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon ). “The  Greatest  Showman” positions itself as a story celebrating diversity, and the importance of embracing all kinds. 

There are those who will see this as a rose-colored-glasses view of what was a pretty exploitive situation. But in a 19th and early 20th century context, the circus and then vaudeville were welcoming places where those who had skills or who were rejected by society could find a home. Barnum put “misfit toys” onstage, saying, in essence, “Aren’t they amazing?” (all while filling his pockets. For more thoughts on P.T. Barnum’s barely acknowledged influence on American culture author Trav S.D.’s 2005 lecture at the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, CT  is a good place to start.) Cary Grant , who had a harsh poor childhood, got his start as a tumbler in a vaudeville troupe. Years later he described his revelatory first visit to the Bristol Hippodrome:

“The  Saturday  matinee was in full swing when I arrived backstage; and there I suddenly found my inarticulate self in a dazzling land of smiling, jostling people wearing and not wearing all sorts of costumes and doing all sorts of clever things. And that’s when I knew! What other life could there be but that of an actor? They happily traveled and toured. They were classless, cheerful, and carefree. They gaily laughed, lived, and loved.”

That’s what “The  Greatest  Showman” captures.

The film starts with the title song “The  Greatest  Show,” a show-stopper with repetitive thumping percussion (reminiscent of Queen’s ferocious “We Will Rock You”). Hugh Jackman—in red impresario’s coat and top hat—takes us on a dazzling tour, with cinematographer Seamus McGarvey keeping the movements fluid, and all the actions connected, plunging you into the center ring. The whole number comes from the brazen heart of showbiz:  Make it interesting! Give ’em something to look at! Make sure you reach the cheap seats!  Barnum croons seductively, “Just surrender cuz you feel the feeling taking over!” I obeyed without reservation.

During the next number, “A Million Dreams” the young and poor Barnum (Ellis Rubin) befriends a well-bred little girl named Charity Hallett ( Skylar Dunn ), and they dream of creating their own destiny. This is the first time in “The  Greatest  Showman” where a character stops speaking and starts to sing instead; the segue is gracefully handled, setting up the artificial device early on. If you don’t set up that trope with confidence, it makes it look like you’re embarrassed to be doing a musical. By the end of the song, the little boy has become Hugh Jackman and the little girl has become Michelle Williams , leaping and twirling across the rooftop of their tenement, bed sheets on the line billowing to the beat. 

After struggling to establish himself, Barnum launches out on his own, creating a theatre in the heart of New York City. He gathers together people with special talents as well as those with physical abnormalities (a giant, a bearded lady, Siamese twins, a dwarf—who would eventually be known as General Tom Thumb, Barnum’s first “breakout star”). The “audition” sequence is extremely tricky, but the tone is set by Jackman’s inclusive delight at the parade of humanity before him. It’s a moment when ignored people are for the first time really  seen .

Lettie Lutz, the “bearded lady,” played by Tony-nominee Keala Settle, with a powerhouse voice, is one of the first to come on board. Settle’s performance—her first major role onscreen—is one of the many keys to why “The  Greatest  Showman” is so effective. She understands the spirit of the project, and you watch her transformation from cringing shame to fearless Diva. Her anthemic “This Is Me” is one of the emotional centers of the film. Barnum’s business partner is playwright and society boy Phillip Carlyle ( Zac Efron ), with snobby parents who are not only horrified at his “slumming,” but also at his romance with an African-American trapeze artist (Zendaya) who sports a pompadour of cotton-candy pink hair. Their love story, as presented, is tender, pained, and sweet.

Rebecca Ferguson plays Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” whom Barnum took on a whirlwind concert tour through America It was his entryway into “polite” society. Jenny Lind’s power ballad “Never Enough” makes you understand why Barnum, backstage, falls in love with her instantly, throwing his marriage into crisis. Ferguson may be lip-synching to Loren Allred’s breathtaking vocals, but it is her performance that carries. 

Ashley Wallen choreographed the numbers and there are many innovative moments, where she uses the outer environment to inform the movements of the characters. In “ The Other Side ,” Barnum convinces a reticent Carlyle to join the circus, and as he sings, the bartender puts down shot glasses, swipes the bar with a cloth, all as accents to the beat. The real standout, however, is “Rewrite the Stars,” the love song between Efron and Zendaya,taking place in the empty circus tent, when she flies on the trapeze far above him, and he tries to climb up the ropes to meet her. Up, down, they both go, sometimes coming together, dangling above the ground, or sweeping in a wide circle together around the periphery of the tent. It is a moment when the film—every element onscreen—merges and transforms into pure emotion. This is what a musical can do like no other artform. 

One of the deep pleasures of “The  Greatest  Showman” is you don’t have to grade the singing and dancing on a curve, as was necessary with “La La Land” (or, further back, to “ Chicago ,” where quick cuts hid Richard Gere’s lack of tap dancing skills.) Hugh Jackman, with his powerful high baritone, got his start in musicals, performing in productions in Melbourne, and then in a hugely acclaimed revival of Oklahoma! in the West End. He won a Tony Award for his performance as Peter Allen in  The Boy From Oz  and has hosted the Tony Awards three times. He is an old-fashioned triple-threat. Film fans may know him mainly as “Wolverine,” and there’s nothing wrong with that, but once upon a time a song-and-dance man like Hugh Jackman’s could sing and dance his way through mainstream Hollywood. He’s unleashed here.

So, too, is Zac Efron, who also got his start because he could sing and dance in the phenom that was “High School Musical.” His career has morphed into something rather unique, with titles like “Hairspray,” “Neighbors,” and a hilarious small part in this year’s “ The Disaster Artist .” He has something that cannot be manufactured, although many try, and that is old-school movie star charisma. Add to that a beautiful voice, plus dancing skills, plus a surprisingly ironic sense of humor, and he’s got the full package. It’s thrilling to see him in a big splashy musical. He’s very much at home. 

Michelle Williams, with anachronistically long blonde hair, has a strong clear voice, and there’s something exhilarating about how she tosses herself into thin air, knowing Jackman will catch her. In what could be a thankless “wet blanket wife” part, Williams adds a spunky sense of adventure, showing us the kind of woman who would say “No” to a ladylike society-wife life, and fling herself into the unknown with her man. 

The timing of this release is interesting. On May 21, 2017, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus folded up its tent for good, after 146 years of uninterrupted operation. Rocked by controversy due to criticisms of exploitation and animal abuse, they retired the elephant acts in 2016, but it was too late. Barnum was dogged by criticisms from the beginning. Many of the “acts” were fakes. Barnum actually didn’t say the quote most associated with him (“There’s a sucker born every minute”) but he might as well have said it and his critics despised him for the assumption about popular entertainment and the regular folk who enjoy it. But in the film, Barnum, with a dazzling smile, explains to a skeptical journalist, “People come to my show for the pleasure of being hoodwinked.” 

I was hoodwinked by “The  Greatest  Showman.” And it was indeed a pleasure. Ringling Brothers may have closed up shop, but Barnum lives on.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O’Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master’s in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

• Zendaya as Anne Wheeler
• Michelle Williams as Charity Barnum
• Rebecca Ferguson as Jenny Lind
• Zac Efron as Phillip Carlyle
• Fredric Lehne as Mr. Hallett
• Hugh Jackman as P.T. Barnum
• Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as WD Wheeler
• Paul Sparks as James Gordon Bennett
• Justin Paul
• Bill Condon
• Jenny Bicks
• Joe Hutshing
• Michael Gracey

Cinematography

• Seamus McGarvey

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‘the greatest showman’: film review.

Hugh Jackman plays P.T. Barnum in 'The Greatest Showman,' a family musical inspired by the life of the legendary 19th-century ringmaster, which also features Zac Efron, Michelle Williams and Zendaya.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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The sawdust and sequins are laid on thick, the period flashbulbs pop and the champagne flows in The Greatest Showman , yet this ersatz portrait of American big-top tent impresario P.T. Barnum is all smoke and mirrors, no substance. It hammers pedestrian themes of family, friendship and inclusivity while neglecting the fundaments of character and story. First-time director Michael Gracey exposes his roots in commercials and music videos by shaping a movie musical whose references go no further back than Baz Luhrmann . And despite a cast of proven vocalists led with his customary gusto by Hugh Jackman , the interchangeably generic pop songs are so numbingly overproduced they all sound like they’re being performed off-camera.

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First, a word about the music: The songs are by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, a fast-rising team who wrote lyrics for the tunes in La La Land ; they composed the charmingly retro score for the musical adaptation of A Christmas Story and penned the affecting emo balladry in the Tony-winning Broadway smash, Dear Evan Hansen . Clearly, these guys can write, and in a variety of genres.

Release date: Dec 20, 2017

The mandate of Pasek and Paul with this long-gestating project, however, appears to have been to come up with accessible pop songs that drag the mid-19th-century story into the here and now. One number after another follows the same derivative template — from the hushed start through the first wave of emphatic instrumentation, building into an all-out explosion of triumphal, extra-loud chorus expressing minor variations on standard-issue themes of self-affirmation. They all sound like bland imitations of chart hits by Katy Perry or Demi Lovato or Kelly Clarkson. Catchy, like Chlamydia.

What the personality-free songs seldom do though is advance the story or deepen our connection to the characters, which means they fail in the most basic job requirement of musical numbers. I started actively dreading the arrival of another song, never a good feeling in a movie musical.

In addition to various screen treatments, the colorful life of Phineas Taylor Barnum was the subject of a 1980 circus-styled Broadway musical called Barnum — not a first-rate show but an entertaining one and a robust star vehicle, in which Cy Coleman’s signature strutting melodies were ideally suited to a central character who was all about dazzling presentation. With his effortless charisma, jaunty swagger and winning smile, Jackman was born to play that role. But like everyone else here, he’s given too little space to inhabit, let alone create a three-dimensional character. Mostly, he’s a handsome prop in a gaudy spectacle that’s no more real than the CG lions leaping about in the finale.

Scripted by veteran TV writer Jenny Bicks ( Sex and the City ) and Bill Condon from a story by Bicks , the movie opens with a hint of Great Expectations . The cheeky young Phineas (Ellis Rubin) accompanies his tailor father (Will Swenson) to the palatial home of well-heeled client Mr. Hallett (Fredric Lehne ), a joyless snob who doesn’t take kindly to the lowly tradesman’s boy flirting with his precious daughter Charity ( Skylar Dunn).

Exposition is swept up in a single song, “A Million Dreams,” in which Phineas and Charity steal childhood moments together in a ghostly abandoned mansion, before blossoming into teenagers. Along the way, P.T. is orphaned. Michelle Williams steps in as the grown-up Charity, while Jackman’s Barnum finds employment with the railroad and returns to claim her hand in marriage. They celebrate by dancing on what looks like a backlot rooftop amid curtains of laundry, against a painted sky; before the song is over, they have two lovely daughters. It’s all so breathless and giddy that instead of flesh-and-blood protagonists, we get familiar cardboard cutouts — the plucky poor kid propelled by drive and imagination, and the self-possessed rich girl who answers only to her heart.

After his initial attempt to draw crowds to a museum of wax figures, taxidermy and assorted other curios fails to take off, Barnum seizes on the idea of authentic human oddities. The real P.T. Barnum’s famed exhibits included such exploitative attractions as the African-American slave Joice Heth, whom the impresario advertised as the 161-year-old “mammy” of George Washington. In this sweetened, semi-fictionalized version, he’s like Tod Browning by way of Mother Teresa, collecting “freaks” unloved by their own parents and welcoming them into a surrogate family where they could feel less alone.

This is territory that co-writer Condon explored more satisfyingly in his unjustly short-lived 2014 reworking of the failed Broadway musical Side Show . But the warmth and unity of that community of carnival outsiders are missing here. (This might have been a very different movie had Condon directed.) Only the pint-sized Charles Stratton (Sam Humphrey) and “bearded lady” Lettie Lutz ( Keala Settle) get significant dialogue or screen time. The rest — a giant, a fat man, Siamese twins, a hairy “dog boy,” an albino and other random exotics that could pass for contemporary Brooklyn hipsters of indeterminate gender — are employed like extras in a Lady Gaga video. That’s also pretty much the model for Ashley Wallen’s aggressive choreography — all power stomps and furious turns, with scarcely a moment of grace.

Amid this overcrowded blur of sketchily drawn characters, a second couple materializes — a youthful, pretty pair to get the preteens swooning. Phillip Carlyle ( Zac Efron) is an upper-class New York theatrical producer roped in by Barnum to bring legitimacy to his business endeavors. Phillip falls in love at first sight with Anne Wheeler ( Zendaya ), half of an African-American duo of sibling trapeze artists. The frowning of high society on a romance that crosses racial lines causes some awkward hesitation on Phillip’s part, but from the moment these two do aerial rope tricks together while singing “Rewrite the Stars,” their fate is sealed.

Conflict, such as it is, comes in predictable form from the damning coverage of starchy theater critic James Bennett (Paul Sparks), so turned off by Barnum’s brand of popular entertainment he calls it a “circus,” which sticks; from an unruly mob of potato-faced Irish bigots, enraged by the Oddities; and from a threat to Barnum’s marriage, when he sets out to extend the fame of celebrated opera singer Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson) from Europe to America.

This being a musical unshackled from its time period, Jenny of course sings yearning power pop with the same processed, disconnected sound as everyone else. Nonetheless, she brings tears to Barnum’s eyes and earns Bennett’s respect. And this being a family film without even a flicker of sexual tension, the interactions of Phineas and Jenny while on tour remain quite chaste, despite the “Swedish Nightingale” declaring her love for him.

The fact that none of this ever acquires much dramatic urgency, even when the circus is torched and lives hang in the balance, is no fault of the cast. The actors do what they can with roles that are barely more than outlines and pre-programmed character arcs. The busy presence of six credited editors might also have something to do with it, suggesting that the story has been cut to ribbons in favor of the assaultive song-and-dance interludes.

Jackman seems incapable of giving an unappealing performance, but there’s just no texture to his role. Barnum early on owns the label “Prince of Humbugs,” literally wearing it on a hat, which indicates the real subject’s renown for hype and fakery. But the worst we see him do is pad an already corpulent man to make him larger, or put a massively tall guy on stilts to, ahem, heighten the effect. The script so sanitizes and simplifies the flamboyant showman that you wonder how anyone could possibly object to what he’s selling.

Ferguson has a tender moment or two, but the roles of Williams and Efron are on the thin side. Of the secondary characters, Zendaya registers strongest, bringing touching sensitivity to her handful of scenes, and looking fabulous in her pink performance wig. Broadway recruit Settle, with her leather lungs, also makes the most of her screen time, leading a big anthemic number about celebrating your uniqueness called “This is Me,” which is basically “I Am What I Am” and “Born This Way” put through a blender.

Director Gracey , cinematographer Seamus McGarvey , production designer Nathan Crowley and costumer Ellen Mirojnick douse everything in such a sparkly modern gloss that the historical locations might as well be studio sets and the story of an American showbiz pioneer becomes just another razzle-dazzle cliche. This is a movie that works way too hard at its magic, continually prompting us with insistent music cues to feel excitement that just isn’t there. If P.T. Barnum had delivered entertainment this flat to his public, the name would have long been forgotten.

Production companies: Laurence Mark, Chernin Entertainment Distributor: Fox Cast: Hugh Jackman , Zac Efron, Michelle Williams, Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya , Keala Settle, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Natasha Liu Bordizzo , Paul Sparks, Sam Humphrey, Austyn Johnson, Cameron Seely Director: Michael Gracey Screenwriters: Jenny Bicks , Bill Condon; story by Bicks Producers: Laurence Mark, Peter Chernin , Jenno Topping Executive producers: James Mangold , Donald J. Lee Jr., Tonia Davis Director of photography: Seamus McGarvey Production designer: Nathan Crowley Costume designer: Ellen Mirojnick Music: John Debney , John Trapanese Songs: Benj Pasek , Justin Paul Editors: Tom Cross, Robert Duffy, Joe Hutshing , Michael McCusker , Jon Poll, Spencer Susser Choreographer: Ashley Wallen Casting: Bernard Telsey , Tiffany Little Canfield

Rated PG, 105 minutes

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Review: In ‘The Greatest Showman,’ a P.T. Barnum Smaller Than Life

By Jason Zinoman

• Dec. 20, 2017

Early in “The Greatest Showman,” P.T. Barnum, played with gung-ho sincerity by Hugh Jackman, says he has long served up hokum, but now wants to do more for his audience: “Just once I’d like to give them something real.”

What fun is that?

Even after the long-running circus bearing his name closed up shop this year, P.T. Barnum remains firmly lodged in the public imagination because of his gift for blurring the line between truth and fiction. When he presented the 161-year-old nurse of George Washington as a star attraction, some of his audience knew she was phony, others did not, and then there were those who did not care and went along for the ride. There’s pleasure in a good fib (spoiler alert: Santa), as well as political advantage. When compared to Barnum last year, Donald Trump responded : “We need P.T. Barnum, a little bit.”

“The Greatest Showman,” a montage sequence that occasionally turns into a movie musical, steers clear of any contemporary resonance and ignores meaty themes. The first-time director Michael Gracey achieves an aggressively synthetic style through kinetic editing and tidy underdog stories, but none of the true joy of pulling a fast one. It’s a standard-issue holiday biopic, one that tells a story about a populist entertainer hungry for highbrow respect, the joys of showbiz and the price of ambition. An amusement park version of P.T. Barnum is fine, as far as that goes, but if you are going to aim for family-friendly fun, you need to get the fun part right.

“Showman” has the ingredients of a splashy good time, since it has the perfect star in Hugh Jackman, the most charismatic Broadway leading man of his generation; and songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul , the acclaimed duo behind the lyrics for last year’s hit movie “La La Land” (which won them Oscars) and the music for the Broadway show “Dear Evan Hansen” (which won them Tonys). But they are all awkward fits for this material. The songs, which shift from defiant pop anthems to melodramatic ballads, do not evoke the circus, or at least not the American version. Their soupy soulfulness belongs to Cirque du Soleil more than Ringling Brothers. And while Mr. Jackman is a dashing presence with an easy smile, his earnest performance could use a few knowing winks. The script doesn’t do him any favors. Its first joke is a spit-take, and it doesn’t get any wittier than that.

Not much time is wasted on Barnum’s early life. Success comes quick, soon after making his American Museum, which mixes flea circuses and bearded ladies. Then Barnum starts chasing respectability, hiring an upper-crust playwright (a colorless Zac Efron), who falls in love with an acrobat (Zendaya), and presenting on tour the opera singer Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson). His star attractions turn into a kind of chorus of eccentrics, with minimal back stories.

Playing the role of a skeptical theater critic as the joyless foil to the giddy fun inspired by Barnum, Paul Sparks maintains a stern deadpan, the way reviewers in movies do. As Barnum’s wife, Charity, Michelle Williams gazes adoringly, until rumors in the press of his affair with Ms. Lind prompt her eyelids to fall in disappointment.

The repercussions of this domestic drama are predictable, but at least they do lead to a delightful redemptive scene (one of the movie’s few pleasingly dreamlike moments), when Barnum uses an elephant as a New York taxi to make an appointment on time. It’s utter nonsense — imagine finding a parking space — but that’s exactly what a movie about the self-proclaimed “Prince of Humbugs” needs.

The Greatest Showman Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

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Film Review: ‘The Greatest Showman’

A wholesomely enraptured musical about the life of P.T. Barnum turns out to be a crowd-pleaser in the best sense: It's a concoction that soars.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“ The Greatest Showman ” is a good old-fashioned cornball PG musical that is also a scintillatingly flashy — and woke! — immersion in up-to-the-minute razzmatazz. It takes the life of P.T. Barnum, the anything-goes circus impresario of the 1800s, who is played with irresistible effervescence by Hugh Jackman , and turns him into a saintly huckster-maestro who invented the spirit of modern showbiz by daring to follow his dream. At the same time, the film takes Barnum’s infamous believe-it-or-not attractions — Tom Thumb, Dog Boy, Tattoo Man, the Bearded Lady — and makes them over into sensitive enlightened outcasts, a kind of 19th-century freak-show gallery of identity politics.

How piously anachronistic is that? Very. Yet “The Greatest Showman” wants to give you a splashy good time, and does, and it’s got something that takes you by surprise: a genuine romantic spirit. The numbers are shot like electromagnetic dance-pop music videos, and to say that they sizzle with energy wouldn’t do them justice — they’re like a hypodermic shot of joy to the heart. You know you’re watching conventional chorus-line-with-a-beat flimflam, all decorating a tall tale, but that’s the ultra Hollywood pleasure of “The Greatest Showman.” It’s a biopic that forges its own uplifting mythology, and if you think back on it when it’s over and feel, maybe just a little bit, like you’ve been had — well, that’s part of its sleight-of-hand charm. P.T. Barnum would have been suckered by it, and would have approved.

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The movie, shot with richly lacquered pizzazz by Seamus McGarvey, opens with a spectacular shot of Jackman’s Barnum, silhouetted under the rafters in his signature long coat and top hat, looking like as pure a creature of theatrical bravado as the M.C. in “Cabaret.” And though “The Greatest Showman” offers a much more family-friendly vision (this film about the sleazy bottom rungs of the entertainment world is one you could easily take young children to), it conjures the spirit of Bob Fosse — his imperious snap and verve — in the sexy precision of its choreography, and in its vision of a lowly circus that titillates and thrills because it demonstrates that all the world’s a stage.

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The basic storyline, however, is tidy in its symmetries, made with a pleasing neo-traditional studio-system squareness. That first number, “The Greatest Show,” with its wild and primitive beat merging into a powerful hook, breaks off after about a minute, leaving us salivating for more stage ecstasy. The movie then flashes back to the 1820s, when Phineas Taylor Barnum is just a kid (played by Ellis Rubin, who suggests a hungry young Pete Townshend), traveling to rich people’s houses along with his tailor father, and watching the two of them get treated like the lowliest of servants. At the snobby home of the Halletts (Frederic Lehne and Kathryn Meisle), Phineas meets their daughter, Charity (Skylar Dunn), and the soaring duet “A Million Dreams,” with its creamy pristine harmonies, establishes “The Greatest Showman” as one of those movies in which a couple fall in love as children, and the enchanted innocence of their connection lets us know that that love will be forever.

Phineas grows up into P.T. Barnum (Jackman), who woos Charity (Michelle Williams) over the disdainful objections of her father. This sets up the essence of his motivation to become a showman: He wants to give Charity the life to which she’s accustomed — and, while he’s at it, to whip her father at his own game.

Barnum ekes out a living in a Dickensian shipping office, and when the company goes bankrupt, he’s got nothing to lose. The couple now has two daughters (Austyn Johnson and Cameron Seely), and Barnum’s fantasy is a kind of trifecta: He wants to fend for his family (he’s wounded at not being able to buy his girls ballet slippers), he wants to validate the love of the wife he lured into poverty — and he wants to do something that no one has done before: turn life, in all its gutbucket wonder, into a star attraction.

Jackman plays Barnum with a rapacious grin, his eyes twinkling with moonstruck pleasure. He wants the whole world to see what he sees, and a little more — he wants them to see the tawdry wonder of it. That will require a new kind of presentational daring, not to mention a little lying. Eagerly, with his eyes on the prize, Barnum lines up his fabulous freaks: a 500-pound man, who he will bill as a 750-pound man (why not?), dubbing him the Irish Giant (even though he’s Russian). A 22-year-old dwarf known as Tom Thumb (Sam Humphrey), whom he dresses as Napoleon on a horse. And, of course, the most singular freak of all: Lettie Lutz (Keala Settle), the Bearded Lady. Barnum convinces these benighted folks to join his circus, housed in a building in Manhattan just as the city’s concrete grandeur is locking into place — the new world being constructed around horse-and-buggy paths. Barnum is already plugging into the notion that people are numb, jaded, overwhelmed. They need something to prod them to life.

The crowd, he says, will have a chance to behold the humanity of his freaks — and that’s true, in a sense, to what P.T. Barnum did. He dragged the strange and the deformed out of the closet (literally, in some cases), and forced his audience to confront their realness. Yet if you’re really going to get real about it, he was a master exploiter. This was not “My Left Foot;” he packaged his freaks as The Other — and “The Greatest Showman” turns Barnum, for all his carny capitalism, into the multiculti Mother Teresa of oddball showmanship. He really believes he’s doing it for their own good, and so does the movie.

Yet when Barnum’s attractions join together to sing and dance their eccentric asses off in the exhilarating chorus of “Come Alive” (“ And you know you can’t go back again,/ To the world that you were living in,/ ’Cause you’re dreaming with your eyes wide open”), the number sweeps you into its majestic syncopated flow, with its hint of gospel, its surge of melodic compassion. The songs were composed by the team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who wrote the lyrics for the songs in “La La Land,” and they’ve crafted rhythms and melodies that drive the movie — gorgeously — forward. When the Bearded Lady gets her own number, the inspirational rouser “This Is Me,” the scene is a pure-hearted epiphany. It’s enough to make you want to see “The Elephant Man” turned into a musical written by Lady Gaga.

The numbers in “The Greatest Showman” have a dance-pop fire that keeps you hooked, and that bursting-out quality recalls, at times, the spirit of “Moulin Rouge!” Yet “The Greatest Showman,” while it’s all but destined to become the crowd-pleaser of the holiday season (and, just possibly, a surprise awards contender), lacks the darkly audacious grandeur that made “Moulin Rouge!” a work of movie-musical art. The film’s conflicts have a storybook simplicity.

Barnum hires, as a right-hand man, a slumming rich-kid playwright, Phillip Caryle ( Zac Efron ), who’s got downscale showmanship in his blood. Phillip is quickly consumed by his love for the black trapeze artist Anne Wheeler (Zendaya), a clandestine passion that builds to the devotional duet “Rewrite the Stars,” a number literally — and spiritually — suspended in air. Efron and Zendaya have a terrific chemistry — they never stop seeking each other out. But it’s Barnum’s wandering eye that drives the film’s conflict.

During a visit to Queen Victoria, he meets the celebrated Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson), and he’s captivated — by her voice, and her crystaline presence. On stage in America, kicking off the tour that Barnum leverages his empire to arrange (which really happened), Jenny, in ruby-red lipstick, sings “Never Enough” with an ecstatic solemnity that leaves you floored. The spectacular vocals are by “The Voice” alum Loren Allred, who with her rapturous cries of “Never! Never!” sounds like Adele ascending into the heavens. Has Barnum fallen in love? A little bit, yet he remains faithful to his wife. The real thing he’s fallen for is Jenny’s dream of upscale sublimity. So he begins to leave his freaks behind.

The director, Michael Gracey, is an Australian maker of commercials who has never directed a feature before, and he works with an exuberant sincerity that can’t be faked. “The Greatest Showman” is a concoction, the kind of film where all the pieces click into place, yet at an hour and 45 minutes it flies by, and the link it draws between P.T. Barnum and the spirit of today is more than hype. Barnum, in his carny-barker way, knows that everyone is a star; his appeal, as Jackman portrays him, is that he changes the world by getting the whole world to believe that. He really did invent the greatest show on earth. Until, of course, it was topped by something called Hollywood.

Reviewed at AMC 34th St., New York, Dec. 10, 2017. MPAA Rating: PG. Running time: 105 MIN.

• Production: A 20th Century Fox release of a Chernin Entertainment, TSG Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox production. Producers: Laurence Mark, Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping. Executive producers: Tonia Davis, Donald J. Lee Jr., James Mangold.
• Crew: Director: Michael Gracey. Screenplay: Jenny Bicks, Bill Condon. Camera (color, widescreen): Seamus McGarvey. Editors: Tom Cross, Robert Duffy, Joe Hutshing, Michael McCusker, Jon Poll, Spencer Susser. Music: Benj Pasek, Justin Paul.
• With: Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams, Zac Efron, Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya, Austyn Johnson, Cameron Seely, Keala Settle, Sam Humphrey, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Ellis Rubin, Skylar Dunn.

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The Greatest Showman Reviews

Give in. Roll up. Sing along.

Full Review | Aug 22, 2023

The vivid cinematography by Seamus McGarvey and the exquisite costumes by Ellen Mirojnick capture the magic of Barnum’s circus and give the picture an attractive period feel.

Full Review | Dec 15, 2022

Quite incongruously, The Greatest Showman suggests that Barnum is a heroic figure, a woke entertainer and family man, who also capitalized on animal suffering and the veritable prostitution of human oddity.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 16, 2022

The movie is a big, loud explosion of color and excitement but one the party's over, somebody's got to clean it all up.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 11, 2022

So nice, so cheerful, its characters so indefatigable that it's impossible to hate.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Aug 24, 2021

It's a rollercoaster of story and music that occasionally moves too fast but delivers enough thrills along the way to be worth the price of admission.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 3, 2021

A serious look at P.T. Barnum's life requires acknowledgment of the ways in which his success manifested. The Greatest Showman is therefore just as much of a fraud as he was.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 2, 2020

While one can fault this sugar-coated take on the Barnum character, it's hard to find fault with Jackman's portrayal of him.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4.0 | Sep 9, 2020

Hugh Jackman dazzles as circus tycoon P.T. Barnum in this criminally underrated biopic featuring a timeless Pasek & Paul songbook of "A Million Dreams" and "Never Enough."

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 3, 2020

It won't be classified as the best movie in the world (or musical for that matter) but it is easy to see why the appeal for the film has been infectious and unanimous.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 26, 2020

A festive musical treat with an enchanting performance from Jackman and a feel-good soundtrack you'll be hunting down as soon as you leave the cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 19, 2020

What is said to be a 'celebration of humanity' lacks just that, using flair and manipulation instead.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 23, 2020

The Greatest Showman is a spectacular modern musical extravaganza in the classic Hollywood style.

Full Review | Jul 17, 2020

Thinking back on this film is giving me a headache. It is a frustrating mess, with much to mock. However, I do admit to being swept along with some of the musical numbers and circus scenes. Ultimately I have to accept that a large part of me enjoyed it.

Full Review | Jul 2, 2020

This movie does a solid job of presenting its story and providing a fantastic place for these new songs.

Full Review | May 21, 2020

This movie does still suffer from a lot of the same problems, musically, that La La Land did, where I can't understand a word that the chorus is saying.

Full Review | May 14, 2020

It had that magic of a musical... I don't know if I'd recommend it. It felt like it was peacocking me the whole time.

This isn't a subtle, finely tuned piece of art, this is cheery lunacy that revels in its attempt to call back on the positive musicals of the past.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 15, 2020

My question is, why not focus on the real facts by digging deeper? What a shame, not only to Barnum's character but also to Lind's.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 27, 2020

The Greatest Showman is so much fun. You got Hugh Jackman's contagious charisma, Zac Efron holding his own and Zendaya flying through the air with ease.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 22, 2020

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

The Greatest Showman

Celebrates the birth of show business and tells of a visionary who rose from nothing to create a spectacle that became a worldwide sensation. Celebrates the birth of show business and tells of a visionary who rose from nothing to create a spectacle that became a worldwide sensation. Celebrates the birth of show business and tells of a visionary who rose from nothing to create a spectacle that became a worldwide sensation.

• Michael Gracey
• Jenny Bicks
• Bill Condon
• Hugh Jackman
• Michelle Williams
• 2K User reviews
• 339 Critic reviews
• 48 Metascore
• 17 wins & 32 nominations total

Top cast 99+

• P.T. Barnum

• Charity Barnum

• Phillip Carlyle

• Anne Wheeler

• Caroline Barnum

• Helen Barnum

• Lettie Lutz

• W.D. Wheeler

• Mr. O'Malley

• Young Barnum

• Young Charity

• Lord of Leeds
• O'Clancy

• James Gordon Bennett
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Rebecca Ferguson 's voice was dubbed by Loren Allred . Ferguson had studied music and admitted that she can carry a tune but since Jenny Lind, her character, is considered the best singer in the world, dubbing her voice would be in service of the movie. However, in order to get into the role, Ferguson insisted on singing the song in front of the extras while filming.
• Goofs In the movie Swedish singer Jenny Lind makes sexual advances towards Barnum while they are touring together. When Barnum rejects her advances, she quits the tour out of frustration and starts a rumor that the two are romantically involved by forcibly kissing Barnum on stage after a performance. Barnum and Lind never had an affair. While it is true Lind quit the tour, she did so because she did not like Barnum's relentless marketing of her and decided to tour with new management. The two actually parted on friendly terms.

P.T. Barnum : [from trailer] No one ever made a difference by being like everyone else.

• Crazy credits An old-fashioned 20th Century Fox logo is shown before the modern one. It was from a 4K digital scan of The Long, Hot Summer (1958) .
• Alternate versions ABC broadcasts speed up the audio at only 2%.
• Connections Edited from The Long, Hot Summer (1958)
• Soundtracks The Greatest Show Music and Lyrics by Benj Pasek & Justin Paul , Ryan Lewis Performed by Hugh Jackman , Keala Settle , Zac Efron , Zendaya & The Greatest Showman Ensemble Produced by Greg Wells , Justin Paul , Alex Lacamoire , Jake Sinclair , Ryan Lewis Mixed by Greg Wells

User reviews 2K

• Dec 17, 2020
• How long is The Greatest Showman? Powered by Alexa
• Did Hugh Jackman and Michelle Williams sing their own songs?
• December 20, 2017 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Official Instagram
• El gran showman
• 1 E 78th St, New York City, New York, USA (James B. Duke House)
• Twentieth Century Fox
• TSG Entertainment
• Laurence Mark Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $84,000,000 (estimated)
• $174,340,174
• Dec 24, 2017
• $469,064,959

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 45 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• Dolby Atmos
• IMAX 6-Track
• Dolby Surround 7.1

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