One of my favorite movies this year was The Greatest Showman. Seriously. I saw it three times in the theater and have already watched it once since purchasing it. It's destined to become a long-term favorite.
But there's one aspect of the story that always leaves me frustrated. SPOILER ALERT.
It's the storyline between P. T. Barnum and Jenny Lind. Now, I don't know the real historical story--I'm just going off the film. The filmmakers build up this fascination that Barnum has with Lind, along with what I consider to be a mutual flirtation that escalates until the moment in which she tries to take things to the next level and he realizes that he needs to go home to his wife.
Seemingly everyone I've talked to about this movie views this scene as a victory for morality because the man stayed faithful to his wife.
I disagree.
What I see in this scene is a man who lets himself become infatuated with a woman who is not his wife. Rather than fighting it, he crafts a set of circumstances in which he is frequently alone with her. He gazes at her. He travels with her. She leans her head on his shoulder while in the coach. And the tension builds.
He consistently leads her on, making her believe that he is interested in her, but he changes his demeanor in the moment in which he rejects her advances to make her believe that she is the crazy one for having fallen for him. She responds badly, which I think is understandable.
She is not without blame--she allowed herself to get emotionally involved with a married man and then threw herself at him--but he is the one who led her on. He is the one who should be accountable for the greatest portion of blame, and yet, in the film, he is not.
She is right, I think, when she tells him, "When you are careless with other people, you bring ruin upon yourself." And although kissing him in front of the cameras was mean and an exercise of poor judgment on her part, I can kind of understand why she did it.
What if Barnum, in the moment of reckoning, had given her a real and honest apology instead of mumbling something about his wife and needing to go home? Not some vague story, not some maybe-it's-an-apology-if-you-read-between-the-lines pseudo-apology to make him look like a good guy without addressing any of the real issues at hand, but a real, heartfelt response covering what he did and what he was responsible for.
Sometime to the effect of, "I am an idiot. I lacked self-control and behaved toward you in ways that I shouldn't have, even though technically, I didn't cross any lines. I have led you on, and I am the person responsible for leading you to respond to me as you have. I made bad choices, and they hurt you, and I know I can't undo the confusion and pain that you must be feeling right now, but I am sorry and will do anything I can to make it right."
But we don't get that in the movies, do we?
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