The Greatest Showman Paints A Beautiful, Catchy Lie

Please note: the following article contains a few mild plot spoilers for The Greatest Showman. You have been warned!

On paper, The Greatest Showman is the perfect film for me. It’s big, loud, unashamedly cheesy, and–bonus!–it’s set in the past. Aesthetically speaking, I was in Heaven, sat in the cinema drooling over P.T. Barnum (Hugh Jackman)’s Ringmaster costume and all the wide shots of pretty Regency-style buildings and lavish set dressings. Thematically, however, I was left disappointed, feeling as if there was a lot left to explore within the narrative that The Greatest Showman presents to its audience. There’s plenty of good things to say about The Greatest Showman, from the catchy soundtrack to its feel-good message, but a lot of its lustre gets lost when you start exploring the real-life history it was built around.

Danielle already touched on this as part of her excellent review of the film, but a lot of Barnum’s troubling past is erased from the silver screen adaptation. The Greatest Showman paints P.T. Barnum as a man whose only issues are that he dreams too much, and that his imagination and desire to impress everyone end up causing him to ignore the people who care about him the most. These are certainly character flaws, but they’re charming ones, where we see Barnum as a quirky, zealous character who simply gets a little too lost in the lure of showbusiness. In real life, however, Barnum was a much more troubling character, one who didn’t care about his performers in the way that The Greatest Showman would have us believe he did.

There’s countless examples of Barnum’s cruelty to his acts, as well as a general disregard for their well-being, from making the five-year-old General Tom Thumb (portrayed as twenty-two in the film) smoke and drink alcohol, to taking bearded lady Annie Jones from her home when she was only nine months old, and making her part of the act from infancy. (Annie is, again, portrayed as much older in the film.) Perhaps the most troubling incident of Barnum’s is his purchasing of blind slave Joice Heth, whose act involved her pretending to be the nurse of George Washington. The most horrific thing about Barnum’s treatment of Heth is that, after her death in 1836, Barnum decided that an autopsy of her body be made public, and charged the public fifty cents each to come and gawk as she was dissected. 1,500 people came to see Heth’s autopsy at the hands of doctor David L. Rogers. Naturally, The Greatest Showman leaves this incident out of its La La Land-esque narrative.

I’m a firm believer in the idea that historical films are allowed to sacrifice historical accuracy for entertainment value, or narrative pay-off. Heck, I’m a huge fan of Hamilton and I can list about twenty historical inaccuracies in the musical off the top of my head. Historical films are allowed to be adaptations, not recreations, but there’s something very sour about The Greatest Showman’s desire to paint everything as good and lovely when its main character is based on someone who orchestrated so much suffering.

The film ignores Heth completely and instead replaces her with a troupe of characters who are shown as being able to overcome any obstacle if they are simply loud and confident enough to shake off the glares and mutterings of the aristocracy. It’s a nice message, of course, that we don’t need to listen to the opinions of people who don’t believe in us, but it’s one that’s a little harder to swallow from characters who would’ve been beaten and mocked in their real lives simply for being born differently. The farthest The Greatest Showman is willing to go in showing us their struggles is to see them getting into a few scuffles, but the “Oddities” ultimately triumph in the end. This works well for the narrative, of course, to see the underdogs winning against hatred, but it’s far from any kind of historical truth.

Is there anything wrong with that, though? In painting everything as a little kinder and more accepting? Surely that’s a more uplifting outcome than seeing women screaming in asylum cells, seeing slaves beaten and locked in cages, seeing circus animals stolen from their homelands and whipped into submission? I could, of course, forgive the film for its saccharine, colourful depictions of America in the nineteenth century if it was an original story. If it was about a fictional circus master who gathered a selection of performers for their fictional circus, I wouldn’t mind so much. I could take it as a quaint depiction of a world that never existed, and get on board with the movie’s musical message of love and acceptance. I could forgive it for its inaccuracies and shaky pacing if it was its own thing, a bright new narrative about someone who never existed and who wanted to make a difference.

But in painting Barnum as a figure whose only flaw was that he dreamed a little too much, we are ignoring a part of history that saw real people tortured and exploited for profit. Where is the movie about Joice Heth? Why are we not celebrating the woman who never had a chance in life, and who wasn’t even allowed peace in death? This is a hard pill to swallow as a movie-goer and a historian, no matter how much you coat the pill in glitter and velveteen jackets.

The Greatest Showman is not a bad movie. I’m not going to tell you not to watch it, and I certainly won’t advise boycotting it with placards and torches like the movies’ mobs are so fond of. The soundtrack is fun, loud and uplifting, and it’s visually interesting to watch. There’s some good choreography, fun set design and it’s all acted well. But if you do see it, know that you’re not seeing the whole story, and that the entertainment that The Greatest Showman offers you once came at the cost of the very acts that the movie tries to portray as strong and unconquerable.

P.T. Barnum was not just a dreamer, he was a profiteer, and his profits came at the cost of real people, not just characters in flashy costumes.

Have you seen The Greatest Showman yet? What did you think of it? Have your say in the comments below.