Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson have worked together exactly twice, and both films have involved Jackman watching Ferguson sing with almost a comical look of rapture on his face.
The first instance was The Greatest Showman in 2017. Ferguson's singing comes in a scene that contains both the film's best and most risible moments. I love the song "Never Enough" that her Jenny Lind sings, so much so that I am willing to call it my favorite thing about the movie, though I've only seen it one and a third times so that may be a premature judgment. (How did I see only a third on the second viewing? We started watching it with the family at an overnight music festival where we were camping out, as part of a sleeping bag movie projected on the big screen, but it wasn't holding the kids' attention enough.) Suffice it to say I've watched this scene by itself about five other times on YouTube.
However this scene also contains reactions from Jackman that are evidence I offer up whenever I'm criticizing the movie in conversation with another movie fan. Jackman, playing the married P.T. Barnum, is supposed to be so taken by the beauty and talent of Lind that he considers straying from his family for her. To depict how smitten he's become, Jackman has chosen to provide an array of goofy expressions that are so extreme as to become laughable.
Here, just check out the clip, as you get both the great song and the goofy grins:
Unfortunately for their subsequent collaboration, Reminiscence, which I watched on Friday night, The Greatest Showman is a masterpiece by comparison. I won't get into my criticisms of the movie at length today, but they are several. Let's just say that this film also has plenty of laughable moments as it tries to ape the exceptional movies that came before it, most notably Strange Days. And I could have done without Jackman's thudding noir-style voiceover, a prime example of the film's overall bad writing.
The aping of The Greatest Showman is probably accidental, but sure enough, this movie has a scene that echoes that scene between Barnum and Lind in the 2017 film.
Nick Bannister (Jackman) is using the film's core technology, which allows you to peer in on a customer's memories and guide them through them so they may experience them again, while in a state of hypnosis in a sensory deprivation tank. He's come across a memory for his current customer, Mae (Ferguson), that's tangential to the memory she came to him to extract, and in the first of many voyeuristic moments in the film, he keeps her under long enough to watch her singing of Rodgers and Hart's "Where or When" as a lounge act on stage.
He's similarly smitten in an almost identical dynamic to The Greatest Showman, though as a sort of corrective, you can sense Jackman pulling back here, laying it on far less thickly. Don't worry, there's plenty of silly over-emoting from him later on.
The film is too new for this clip to be available on YouTube, and maybe it never will be. So while I still have 38 hours remaining of my iTunes rental, I've videoed the scene myself, just to provide a parallel structure for the evidence presented in this post:
Now don't get me wrong, Hugh Jackman is one of my favorite movie stars. He seems so likeable at his core that I feel a connection to him even when he's playing someone rotten, which is not all that often given his charismatic leading man traits. He's Australian too, so there's that. I'm not having a laugh at his expense.
Though I do have to admit that Jackman is probably never going to be recognized as a talented actor. Out of the 48 feature films that appear on the Wikipedia page dedicated to his filmography, he has only the one Oscar nomination for his lead performance in Les Miserables -- a pretty dubious distinction considering that this is also a terrible film.
However, Hugh, I do have to hand it to you. I think I would also be pretty gob-smacked watching Rebecca Ferguson sing.
And in Reminiscence, it's actually her doing the singing, unlike The Greatest Showman.
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