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The finest aspect of the 2024 motion picture “Wicked” was its conclusion. Following approximately two and a half hours of questionable “Wizard of Oz” reinterpretations, unwavering antifascist sentiments, and digitally polished musical numbers, the director Jon M. Chu brought the spectacle to a satisfying close. Ascending on a broomstick over the Emerald City, Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo)—verdant of complexion, peaked of hat, eternally righteous of heart—rose to the zenith of her enchanted capabilities and instilled dread in her adversaries. “I’m flying high, defying gravity!” she crooned, while concurrently rebuffing the Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum), a totalitarian charlatan, and her complicit acquaintance, Glinda (Ariana Grande), a woman possessing pastel-pink aesthetics and the moral fortitude of a sugared confection. Elphaba evolved into the Wicked Witch of the West, a suitable scapegoat for an alarmist authoritarian administration. What a world, what a world. The End.
Regrettably, not so. The foundational material here is the enduring stage production “Wicked,” which itself was a synthetically sweetened rendition of Gregory Maguire’s substantially more somber 1995 book, “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.” On Broadway, it necessitated two and a half hours, coupled with a fifteen-minute pause, for the performance to dispense its narrative—an intricate, witch’s perspective prequel to the celebrated L. Frank Baum narrative “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and its timeless 1939 cinematic translation. Nonetheless, in adapting “Wicked” for the silver screen, Chu and the scriptwriters Winnie Holzman (who composed the script for the stage show) and Dana Fox determined that more would equate to improved quality. Dismissing conciseness, they bisected the film into two segments—“Wicked: Part I” and the recently unveiled “Wicked: For Good”—effectively magnifying the duration to five hours and extending the interlude to the duration of a year.
Such instances of cinematic division are scarcely novel within Hollywood, featuring a two-installment “Dune” adaptation and a two-part “Mission: Impossible” escapade among the most current examples. Are such decisions propelled by artistic merit, financial considerations, or a fluctuating amalgamation of the two? The “Wicked” partition, at minimum, exuded mercenary absurdity from its inception, particularly for those who recall the disproportionate concentration of the show’s limited delights. “Part I,” regardless of its imperfections, rendered those pleasures fairly competently. It presented us with Erivo and Grande, as harmoniously matched as pistachio and cherry, and sufficiently sonorous to supply commendable contemporary interpretations of “Defying Gravity” and “Popular,” the show’s pair of exceptional songs, penned by the composer and songwriter Stephen Schwartz. Chu, who established his footing with the “Step Up” series, managed the expansive musical facets of “Wicked” with a flair for presentation. Furthermore, the ensemble-organizing capabilities that he refined on “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018) aided him effectively amidst the playful antics at Shiz University, Oz’s premier institution of enchantment, where Elphaba, a scholarly outcast, confronted the cherished yet less proficient Glinda.
Within “Wicked: For Good,” academic pursuits are emphatically relegated to the past. The Wizard has transitioned into a comprehensive autocrat—a shift that Goldblum subtly underplays, featuring a sinister diminutive “Can’t we get along?” gesture—and the ramifications prove notably severe for lions, tigers, and bears. In bygone times, the fauna of Oz enjoyed parity in rights with humanity, encompassing the aptitude for speech, but the majority have now been rendered mute and either confined or banished. These Orwellian developments, akin to virtually everything else in the film, register with a self-important clang: “This is not the Oz I recognize,” Elphaba bemoans, liberating creatures from enclosures at every opportunity. She even emancipates the Wizard’s winged primates, who, more cursed than graced by the endowment of flight, have morphed into a cohort of irate yelpers. Not to be overshadowed in acrimony, Michelle Yeoh reappears, amidst an outburst of hocus-pocus gesticulation and avian-assault hairstyle, as the Wizard’s most pitiless confederate. Conveniently, she operates under the moniker Madame Morrible. (Was Crazy Witch Asian perceived as excessively unsubtle?)
As an element of an anti-Wicked Witch of the West disparagement endeavor, Morrible endeavors to capture the loyalties of Elphaba’s nearest former classmates: Glinda, a smiling yet ambivalent symbol for the Oztocracy, and the dashing Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), presently captain of the Wizard’s guard. However, Fiyero’s affections reside with Elphaba, and, notwithstanding the duress exerted upon him and Glinda into a highly publicized betrothal, the atmosphere is permeated with political and emotional deceit. Theirs is not the singular romantic entanglement transpiring. In my estimation, a disproportionate volume of “Wicked: For Good” unfolds akin to “Oz the World Turns,” albeit I would credit the majority of daytime dramas with superior production caliber. Why does every aspect of this film, despite its lavishly gilded, emerald-embellished stage design, exist in a state of either excessive dimness or luminance—so blindingly backlit that Oz appears to be under continuous thermonuclear assault, or so obscure that one could scarcely differentiate a monkey from a Munchkin?
Munchkinland, as it transpires, is currently administered by Elphaba’s younger sister, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who does not partake of her sibling’s unwavering integrity. Nessarose employs a wheelchair, and among the most deplorable facets of “Wicked: For Good” is its conflation of physical impairment and soul-crushing resentment. Nessarose has been furnished with no supplementary form of expression; she embodies clinginess and thwarted envy. She harbors animosity toward Elphaba for her insurrection, just as she resents Boq (Ethan Slater), a Munchkin whom she adores, for forsaking her to pursue Glinda. Boq’s surname, parenthetically, is Woodsman, and one needn’t be an Oz authority to perceive the ominous trajectory in which all this is headed. Simply adhere to the yellow brick thoroughfare.
This, to the best of my assessment, constitutes the rationale for “Wicked: For Good”’s existence: to enable the occurrences of Baum’s literary work and the 1939 cinematic rendition, eternally fused within the collective consciousness, to be maneuvered into position. However, must they be maneuvered so awkwardly, and with such a glaring absence of intelligence or heart? In due course, we shall be acquainted with Dorothy Gale—triggering a scattering of gingham glimpses—and forcibly fed origin narratives for her traveling companions, which span from the nonsensically manufactured to the gratuitously traumatizing. (Even if your progeny can stomach the Tin Man’s genesis, the Scarecrow’s cornfield crucifixion might represent the final straw.) Onstage, all of this narrative revisionism possesses an affable behind-the-scenes ingenuity, as if the storyline were being furtively augmented in the margins. Onscreen, and in comprehensive exhibition, it approximates an abomination—a distortion of fairy-tale rationale and pop-cultural recollection. By the juncture at which Dorothy and her cohorts march upon Elphaba’s lair, there appears to be something more pernicious than mere mediocrity at play. It manifests as though the picture were so intimidated by its iconic predecessor that it could solely respond with a peevish compulsion to obliterate the classic it could never emulate.
Maguire’s novel itself was composed in the disposition of a rectification; it aspired to introduce a morally ambiguous modernism and a mature, straightforward sexuality to bear upon Baum’s immaculately clean demarcations of virtue and malevolence. However, concerning the carnal dimension, at least, the musical is constructed from gentler constituents. The less articulated the better concerning Elphaba and Fiyero’s mawkish seduction composition (“Somehow I’ve fallen / under your spell / And somehow I’m feeling / it’s up that I fell”), or concerning what masquerades, miserably, for pillow discourse: “You’re beautiful,” Fiyero murmurs, and, upon Elphaba accusing him of fabrication, he replies, “It’s not lying. It’s looking at things in another way.” How does that register for flattery?
Some authentic ardor does ignite when Elphaba and Glinda, reconnected by catastrophe, permit their protracted rivalry to seethe over in a wand-versus-broomstick confrontation. Which witch materializes victorious—not merely from that altercation but from the totality of this occupied, perplexed, hopelessly mangled movie? I would submit that the film is fortunate to possess them both. Within the initial installment, Erivo rendered common decency palpable; here, it’s gratifying to witness Elphaba in assertive defiance of the Wizard’s regime. Grande, likewise, has matured into her own. Subsequent to her subtle comic high jinks in “Part I,” she shoulders the more intricate endeavor of articulating Glinda’s inaugural genuine encounter with rejection and disillusionment. “It’s time for her bubble to pop,” she sings of herself, within a quavering ballad—one of two novel songs, neither memorable, that Schwartz composed for the film. This infrequent moment of self-awareness materializes at perhaps the most inopportune juncture: Glinda resides within her opulent tower chamber, observing from an elevated vantage point as the Emerald City descends into disarray.
It’s insensitive yet candid. “Wicked: For Good” is strewn with allusions to the simple-minded masses of Oz—their credulity, their avarice, their imbecility. Elphaba employs this as justification for her ultimate self-sacrifice and transformation into a public symbol of incarnate evil: as she relays to Glinda, “They need someone to be wicked, so that you can be good.” The Wizard champions his individual iteration of this concept, confident that the populace can be appeased by the semblance of a common adversary. The cynicism, while scarcely misplaced, registers as thoroughly unearned. The “Wicked” films never persuade us—in the vein that “The Wizard of Oz” or Walter Murch’s darkly captivating “Return to Oz” (1985) persuaded us—of the fantastical actuality of Oz as an actual locale. Chu and his screenwriters exhibit no inquisitiveness concerning the annals, civilization, and governance of the realm, or even concerning the potential ramifications of the people’s submission to the Wizard’s fascism. The citizenry of Oz are addressed as no more than an undifferentiated multitude of extras, an ignorant and ultimately expendable monolith. The movie’s adulation of the audience, and of our purportedly superior conscience, constitutes an expression of the same disdain. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
