No Room Under the Big Top

Is it better for art to please audiences or challenge them? Some few of us are pleased to be challenged but usually artists find they must lean more in one direction or another, that satiety and intelligent discourse are often at odds. I don't think there's any shame in either one, though a diet consisting entirely of one or the other is likely to make one psychically malnourished. And then there's the peculiar tragedy of a work of art that thinks it's doing one thing when it's really doing another. Such a movie is 2017's The Greatest Showman.

A lot of people would argue The Greatest Showman knows exactly what it's doing, that it's exploiting the life of P.T. Barnum in much the way P.T. Barnum himself might have. And in some sense, that's true. The best part of the film is the first fifteen minutes or so which takes off at a breakneck pace, efficiently presenting a story of a poor kid with a big dream growing to be an extraordinary man.

There's a lovely scene on a rooftop where Barnum (Hugh Jackman) rapidly improvises a birthday gift for his little girl, a simple lantern he cobbles together which he tells his family is a device designed to make wishes come true. It reminded me of the scene in Fanny and Alexander wherein another great showman, played by Allan Edwall, improvises a story for his little girl about a chair, telling her how it's a rare and fantastic treasure. When he pretends that he's going to destroy it, she shrieks for him to stop, a reaction that clearly more than pleases him but confirms a love he has for her and her imagination. The emphasis on that scene is on the little girl whereas the Greatest Showman scene is on the showman. But it was the girl I was thinking of anyway.

The movie was recommended to me by one of my favourite students at the school I work at. And knowing her as I do, I can see how the enthusiasm of the musical numbers appealed to her, how the costumes and the story of a good man dazzling the world appealed to her. And just like Fanny in Fanny and Alexander, I value her for that imagination. But just like a lot of other critics, I'm cursed with too much knowledge not only of P.T. Barnum but of human nature in general to enjoy the film that follows those exuberant early scenes.

So the film brushes past questions of animal cruelty, of any mercenary motives in Barnum's heart, of any complicating personality qualities in his team of misfit performers. This leads to an obnoxious musical number, "This is Me", following a scene where Barnum quietly shuts out his circus performers from a swanky reception at an opera house. Arguably, what Barnum does in this scene is what the filmmakers do by pruning out any uncomfortable aspects of Barnum's life and career. And in addition to this, the inclusion of one slightly realistic piece of injustice begs the question of why this one was worthy to be included and the others weren't.

I wonder what it would be like to see the movie innocently. I still don't think I could embrace the oddly combative tone of "This is Me" ("We are warriors"? You want to be warriors?). And the film ultimately seems less interested in celebrating spectacle (how could it when it has so much cgi?) as it is about enjoying success, a concept I find entertaining but less interesting. And not quite what the film purports to say.

The Greatest Showman is available on Disney+.

Three Out of Three

In love and relationships, passions run so high and people have so much pride on the line, each party in a dispute may be fully committed to a different version of reality. Many comedies and dramas have been written from this premise, including the charming 1957 musical Les Girls. Featuring songs by Cole Porter that don't rank among his best they're adequate for the film because lovely visuals and a great cast more than pick up the slack. The screenplay isn't Rashomon but it's not bad, either, and director George Cukor exercises his formidable storytelling instincts.

The man with the sandwich board wanders a crowded street outside a courtroom in which the sensational trial everyone's talking about forms the film's framing story. A wealthy society woman named Sybil (Kay Kendall) has written a scandalous memoir and she's been taken to court for it by Angele (Taina Elg), with whom Sybil once worked as a dancer on stage in Paris. The film's divided into three parts for three versions of events and in the first one Sybil tells us about Angele's torrid affair with their manager and co-star, Barry Nichols (Gene Kelly).

This was my favourite part of the movie as we're introduced to the three flatmates who banter engagingly about life in Paris and devotion to work. In this, Sybil's version of events, Sybil is a composed, sensible woman; Angele is reckless and romantic; and rounding out the trio is the ever chipper but somehow unobtrusive Joy (Mitzi Gaynor). Despite their misgivings, Sybil and Joy help conceal Angele's affair with Barry even when they're not supposed to know about it themselves. Angele and Barry go through a thin pantomime of greeting each other for the neighbours' benefit and then take off together in a car around the corner.

This sequence has the best song, "Ca C'est L'amour", in a really lovely scene where Angele and Barry relax in a row boat.

Angele's fiance is incensed by Sybil's account so Angele takes the stand to tell the story of an extravagantly alcoholic Sybil torn between Barry and a wealthy Englishman--Sybil's present day husband. Finally, Barry himself takes the stand to set things straight--it was Joy he'd been going with the whole time. But as Joy herself remarks, there's too much in Sybil and Angele's stories they couldn't have made up so by the end of the film there's a reasonable argument for the veracity of any one of the stories.

Supposedly the alternate points of view are motivated by Sybil and Angele each believing that the other had tried to commit suicide over the impossibility of being with Barry. Barry's story offers an explanation for the confusion but really doesn't clear things up.

There's a terrific dance sequence at the end seemingly modelled on The Wild One--minus the emotionally authentic portrayal of misfit youth but with a great heat of its own. It follows a tradition in musicals of the 50s and late 40s wherein there's at least one big dance sequence that has nothing at all to do with the plot. The movie resolves on a nicely uncertain note, allowing the audience to contemplate the insoluble puzzle of tangled romance.