‘The Greatest Showman’ Is a Great and Terrible Circus Musical That You’ll Be Happy to Watch on VOD

Weekend Watch is here for you. Every Friday we’re going to recommend the best of what’s new to rent on VOD or stream for free. It’s your weekend; allow us to make it better. 

What to Stream This Weekend

Movie: The Greatest Showman
Director: Michael Gracey
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, Zendaya, Michelle Williams, Rebecca Ferguson, Keala Settle
Available on: Amazon Prime and iTunes

Streaming home video might not be the perfect venue for every movie — just consult the ongoing spat between Netflix and the Cannes Film Festival for more on that — but it just might be the perfect venue for a film like The Greatest Showman. The original movie musical, a rare bird, indeed, to not have been based on any preexisting film or Broadway production, is now available to rent on VOD platforms, and there it offers the single best way to absorb this behemoth of a musical that is both great and terrible, hugely entertaining and a crushing, disappointing bore, with songs that will get stuck in your head either happily or like parasites that will require the use of a sharp drill bit to extricate. It’s fun!

The thing about The Greatest Showman is that it makes itself impossible to ignore. It’s just so big, so eager to entertain you, and so incredibly damned successful. $420 million worldwide since opening just before last Christmas, amid the usual competitive December marketplace. This is a good thing for many reasons. For one, it gives studios permission to take chances on original movie musicals. That’s the big one. In a marketplace that seems utterly petrified of trying anything new, you can at least point to The Greatest Showman and say “This Adderall-and-optimism-fueled circus nightmare of a movie starring a charismatic Australian, two understated dramatic actresses, and Fancy Rich Zac Efron made a bajillion dollars despite not having anything to do with any Disney animated classics.” It also reminded us that Zendaya should also swing about on ropes in movies even though Spider-Man has her snarking from a cafeteria table instead.

But the reason why you’re going to be happy that The Greatest Showman is on VOD now is so you don’t have to watch all of it. Or you can watch other parts twice in a row. Or you can bounce around this narrative of the life story of P.T. Barnum (who, yes, was in real life an exploiter and racist and animal-abuser, but one look at this movie will likely disabuse anyone of the notion that what’s onscreen reflects any kind of mutually-accepted reality), who is played by Hugh Jackman as an anthropomorphized enthusiastic inhale. He’s a dreamer! A true American entrepreneur and artist, whose film-flammery is only in service of putting on a show. A great show. Perhaps the greatest show. Jackman’s always been a fascinating actor; everybody seems to be in agreement about this, though mostly that fascination seems to settle on how he can bounce from hypermasculine Wolverine in the X-Men movies to loafer-light song and dance in this or on Broadway or in Les Mis (okay, not a lot of dancing there, but stick with me). But it’s more than that. Jackman is a human uncanny valley, whose eagerness to please rides right along the line that separates delight and terror. This is an actor who is going to work his toned little ass off to entertain you, be it by song, dance, or adamantium claw. But the harder he tries, the closer he inches towards that line, and with one toe over it, that effort becomes repellant. That plastered-on grin of a pure and unself-conscious  hoofer becomes the rictus of a man desperate to dance as fast as he can lest you turn away from him and he disappear forever.

What I’m saying is, you can’t watch Jackman for too long in this movie or else you’ll have to turn away. The confluence of Barnum the cynical huckster and Jackman the earnest song-and-dance entertainer becomes very close to unbearable, and The Greatest Showman can’t step away from him long enough to let the audience’s screaming subconscious calm down. So you’ll want to be able to skip past, say, the interminable “A Million Dreams,” which tracks Barnum and his sweetheart Charity from childhood through marriage and children, seemingly in real time. That said, you might want to double up on a song like “Never Enough,” where famed Swedish vocalist Jenny Lind power-ballads her way to international headlines.

The songs comes courtesy of the lauded songwriting pair of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, Oscar-winners for their work on La La Land and Tony-winners for creating Dear Evan Hansen. (They’re currently an Emmy away from the full EGOT, which will almost certainly happen. They’re also 32 and 33 years old, respectively. It’s disgusting.) Pasek and Paul have been canny about branding themselves as a wunderkind duo churning out original material when the industry (both on Broadway and in Hollywood) are obsessed with repackinging recognizable brands. It’s hugely necessary that they’re doing it. It would just be nice if their laurels were for more consistent work. Their songwriting is characterized by poppy hooks and empowering lyrics, which makes them appeal strongly to younger audiences (again, a desperate necessity for musicals today), but the songs themselves vary wildly between affecting and embarrassing. Evan Hansen will serve up an aching ballad about loneliness one minute and then an embarrassing up-with-YouTube ode to the world recognizing your specialness the next. La La Land — which won an Oscar for the snoozy “City of Stars” — actually fares best with subtlety, with several other songs containing darker undercurrents than their peppy surfaces suggest. None of the highs on The Greatest Showman approach insight, but the best songs (“Never Enough,” “Rewrite the Stars,” even the aggressively extra “The Greatest Show”) are irresistibly fun. The worst are the ones that can’t escape the universally cringe-worthy lyrics. “Come Alive” with its “dreaming with your eyes wide open” chorus. It’s like a Mad Libs of uplift in all the songs, and the best you can hope for is that the melodic swells will whisk you past them quickly enough that you don’t notice. That’s how you can get away with loving the Oscar-nominated “This Is Me” despite lyrics about sending a flood to drown out your haters.

So skip what works for you and rush to watch the parts you like over and over again. I will personally be watching Zac Efron and Zendaya doing aerial acrobatics on “Rewrite the Stars” quite a few more times between now and whenever either the rental period runs out or The Greatest Showman is sent to jail for crimes against chill-ness.

Where to stream The Greatest Showman