"People come to my show for the pleasure of being hoodwinked. Just once, I'd love to give them something real."

The great, self-serving irony of "The Greatest Showman" is that supposedly being hoodwinked is what's real, whereas that purported as real is a classist fraud perpetuated by snobs and joyless critics--perhaps, like the very ones who panned this movie (checking as of this writing, it holds a poor 56% score on Rotten Tomatoes). As opposed to the depiction here of the historical figure of P.T. Barnum, however, whose humbuggery hardly extends any further than padding the weight of a fat man or selling a tall guy, for whatever reason, as Irish, the movie itself is largely a fiction debased from the historical record. Nevertheless, "The Greatest Showman" is an immense, musical spectacle, and I can appreciate the symmetry of a movie that lies about a showman who likewise deceived. This reflexivity, however, is, again, self-serving and nothing along the lines of, say, "F for Fake" (1973) is done with the illusion beyond the preservation of it.

I learned a bit about the historical Barnum as ancillary to my studies of itinerant exhibitors of early cinema, who would incorporate some of the same sort of variety acts and showmanship into their entertainments. The scene in "The Greatest Showman" of the light-and-shadows show Barnum gifts his daughters is a nice touch in this regard, alluding to the future spectacle and novelty of motion pictures. My favorite scene, too, might be the rebuke of Disney, with a young Barnum stealing a loaf of bread as though he were Aladdin, then, being offered an apple by a woman recalling Disney's typical association of ugliness with villainry in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), which makes it kind of ironic that I viewed "The Greatest Showman," originally distributed by 20th Century Fox--a studio since acquired by Disney, on Disney+.

I also appreciate the analogy here of racial discrimination with that against the so-called "freaks" of Barnum's show, although the fictional interracial romance between two fictional characters hardly rises above an ancestry commercial. And, before turning Barnum into some handsome white savior and although he reportedly became an abolitionist, his start in showbiz wasn't offering dignity to a dwarf; he purchased a person and touted her as the 161-year-old slave of George Washington--later exposing the hoax, too, by charging admission to an autopsy. That doesn't make for a fluffy, sometimes-repetitive musical, though.

Since they fictionalized history, however, I still would've hoped they wouldn't do so as to make some of the women in the story less compelling and, in the case of the real singer Jenny Lind, into a libelous homewrecker trope. Michelle Williams, too, as the housewife is wasted. A talented actress, she's proven that she can do well even with small roles ("Brokeback Mountain" (2005), "Manchester by the Sea" (2016), e.g.), but there needs to be some promise to the part--something more than being required to smile and stand by the Hugh Jackman song-and-dance show. Yet, "The Greatest Showman" is admittedly spectacular eye candy, with pleasant dancing and musical numbers, including the Oscar-nominated "This Is Me." Sometimes it may, indeed, be a pleasure to be hoodwinked.