Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Greatest Showman
2017 · Michael Gracey · The Greatest Showman on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how long the camera travels during the barroom number. (camera)
The Other Side plays as a near-continuous move. McGarvey's camera glides with Jackman and Efron around the bar while a negotiation turns into choreography. The cutting is not doing the work here.
Payoff: The change in the scene is carried by a moving camera and two bodies rather than by a cut. In the reading: the mobile section (plan). The reading calls this a mobile section: a shot whose own movement expresses the change, instead of a cut announcing it.
Notice that people change their minds during songs. (structure)
The dialogue scenes between numbers are short and quick. Decisions, reversals and declarations all land inside the music. Almost nothing gets settled by what anyone says in a room.
Payoff: The songs carry the causation. Watch for plot between numbers and you will find very thin connective tissue. In the reading: attraction-image. The reading calls each number an attraction: a self-contained turn aimed straight at the paying crowd, like a circus act.
Look at the colors in the interiors and the ring. (light)
McGarvey works in saturated jewel tones: amber rooms, deep blacks, pools of theatrical color. None of it is trying to look like 1850s New York. Every choice is pitched to feeling.
Payoff: The palette does the emotion's job rather than the period's. Color is the main instrument the film plays. In the reading: affective color. The reading calls this affective color: color absorbing a whole scene into one feeling instead of describing a real place.
Watch the troupe move as a single body. (staging)
In the big numbers the performers lock into shared patterns, arranged from above into shapes no individual dancer can see. Gracey holds the ensemble in frame instead of cutting out soloists.
Payoff: The group becomes one figure on screen. These are people who get no standing as individuals anywhere outside the ring.
Listen for how modern the songs sound against the costumes. (sound)
Pasek and Paul write in current radio language: pop stomps and power ballads mixed as full contemporary productions. The images stay nineteenth century. Nothing in the music attempts a period sound.
Payoff: The collision is the strategy Luhrmann used in Moulin Rouge. These songs are built to leave the film and live on their own.
Once you have seen it
Watch Keala Settle step out from the wings. (performance)
This Is Me starts backstage with Lettie refusing to stay hidden and builds into the whole troupe marching forward. Settle plays it out at the audience rather than at another character.
Payoff: The song outgrew the film completely. Watch how directly it is aimed past the story at the people watching it.
Listen to Jenny Lind's voice against Rebecca Ferguson's face. (sound)
Ferguson stands on the concert stage and the voice belongs to Loren Allred. Every number is pre-recorded and lip-synced, which is standard practice, and this is the film's showpiece of authentic feeling.
Payoff: The most sincere moment in the picture is a stitched one. Barnum would have recognized the construction immediately.
Watch the trapeze duet in Rewrite the Stars. (staging)
Two people with no available action, divided by class and race, get an aerial number instead of a scene. They swing, let go and are carried by the arc. Then they come down.
Payoff: The film stores what its plot will not allow inside movement. Notice where the situation stands once the song stops.
Count the scenes that show Barnum's business going wrong. (structure)
The film borrows the outline of his rise and keeps the troupe as a found family. The deceptions and the exploitation that actually built the enterprise are reframed or left out entirely.
Payoff: This is a fable wearing a historical name. The gap between the two is where every argument about the film starts.
Carry this in: Watch where the decisions happen. In this film people change their minds inside songs, not inside scenes.