At first, I was enjoying this more than expected. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo absolutely carry an otherwise grating and unremarkable serving of contemporary Hollywood’s corporate slop. Grande as Glinda in particular was really enjoyable to watch; her performance has a classic quality of a piece with mid-century American musicals, even down to a strange, clipped transatlantic accent. There’s a lot of nervous energy coming off her many tics and hair tosses, and she’s a great singer who performs her numbers with fabulous range. Erivo brings some actual pathos to her role as Elphaba, and also really sells her numbers. The casting of a dark-skinned Black actor in the role brings out some latent commentary on racism and colourism in the Broadway original, even more so as Eviro reportedly worked with costume designers in order that Elphaba’s on-screen look retained some signifiers of a specifically Black femininity (braids, nails, etc). Elphaba was originally played by Idina Menzel, a Jewish actor of Russian heritage. Depictions of witchcraft have a history entangled with antisemitism, and Menzel’s performance therefore also has a weighted historical provenance. But this new adaptation feels consciously reposed in a way that speaks to a Black experience (Elphaba’s greenness) of a predominantly white space (Shiz University), complete with many microaggressions and prejudicial vilification giving way to faux-celebration after Elphaba catches the eye of celebrity (Oz). This largely comes from Eviro’s great performance, playing the character always stuck between an outward show of indifference and the ongoing hurt it masks. Grande holds up her end of this dynamic as an appropriately shallow antagonist, who only comes to show interest in (but not respect for) Elphaba when she proves to have some clout in the eyes of figures of magical authority. From this core character relationship an antifascist thread in the story emerges slowly. Othered peoples (or animals) are censored and disappeared by Oz’s police, as met with silence by a complicit population that Elphaba repeatedly criticises. Oz himself is depicted as more despotic than ever, and Elphaba is reclaimed as a victim of authoritarian misrepresentation and character assassination, oppressed hero rather than cackling villain. Will this politics bear further fruit in the sequel?
It’s a shame then that these two sincere and timelessly styled lead performances find themself in such a misshapen production. I have never seen the stage version, but I know that its runtime is shorter than this adaptation of just its first act. It seems that when its second concluding act is released as Wicked: For Good this November, John Chu and Universal Pictures will have at least doubled Wicked in length to around 5 hours. It’s straining at the seams. Sequences stretch on endlessly, destroying the pace of the film by its end. The most notable way in which this happens is the butchering of a few pivotal numbers by interrupting them with interstitial moments of dialogue, before the song clamorously lurches back to life again, and again. After spending the whole film waiting for its biggest hit, Defying Gravity, it arrives having been hacked into bloody chunks dispersed between some turgid climactic action sequences. Fiyero’s big number Dancing Through Life feels like it takes an eternity for similar reasons. Not that I liked many of the songs anyway, but millions do and I’ll just mark that down as personal taste. Admittedly it must be hard to deliver such weak material with impact, but everyone outside of Grande and Eviro were quite irritating. Fiyero and Boq miserably so (and visibly far too old to be students), Michelle Yeoh can’t sing at all and seems checked out, Peter Dinklage is shafted with yet another awful ‘creature’ role as a CGI goat academic, Bowen Yang is at his least funny as a mouthpiece for some SNL-worthy quipping. And Jeff Goldblum; I can’t be the only one that’s so tired of this act? The majority of his roles in the last decade have been essentially cameos in juggernaut entertainment industry productions or rigamarole Wes Anderson repeats, in which he shows up, waits a moment for the audience’s cheers of recognition to die down, and does his memeified routine. He’s just chasing that bag, but I shouldn’t be expected to enjoy watching it
Wicked also infuriatingly commits heavily to the most frustrating device of big-budget prequels; a need to explain in minute detail the origin story of almost everything that appears in source material, here The Wizard of Oz. We learn the lore of the monkeys’ wings, the slippers, the name ‘Glinda,’ the Cowardly Lion’s childhood, Elphaba’s crooked hat, even the circumstances of Oz choosing yellow bricks to colour his civil engineering project. The issue is that these aren’t presented as easter eggs or oblique references for attentive fans, they are absolutely in the foreground of the story, distractingly so. It makes the film feel creatively bankrupt in its insecure need to constantly refer to iconic material from the source work rather than its own story; “remember this? Remember this? Remember this?” It’s as though whoever conceived this tortured 5 hour inflation of the script structured it around a bullet point list entitled “The Bits from The Wizard of Oz with the Best Brand Recognition.” The worst offender for me personally was the yellow bricks moment, which was so egregious that my living room collectively checked out of the scene and chatted over the rest of it, despite it being nearly the film’s finale. I assume much of the dialogue throughout is additional padding to stretch the adaptation out to epically monetizable proportions, explaining how inessential it feels. .
Finally, and as much-discussed during Wicked’s inescapable promotional cycle, the film looks terrible. It’s shot and lit like a Marvel film; flat light, washed-out colours, limited imagination in camera angles combined with hypermobile (CGI-assisted) swoops and rotations in moments of bombast. Not one colour pops in the whole film, which feels like a desaturated stain upon the Technicolour legacy of the 1939 original. You know, the film that built an entire sepia set just to seamlessly transition into Judy Garland marveling at the wonderful colours of Oz and in doing so expand the minds of its audience? But the issue runs deeper than the colour timing and lensing of the film; I hated the art direction as well. Sets and costumes are lacking in personality or texture, more budget theme park than movie magic. Everything feels overdesigned; the Emerald City is a monstrosity of twisting reflective towers and particle effects, the school uniforms are weird asymmetrical multi-layered messes, its library a massive rotating clockwork space in which surely the books would fall out of the ceiling. All this is either wholly rendered or digitally extended using some unconvincing CGI. Character models are particularly weak, with Dinklage’s goat and Elphaba’s bear mum both looking glossy and lacking weight in their animations. I think the flat lighting of the piece is largely to blame; it’s hard to composite a digital element into a given shot when it lacks clear shadows and directionality which a talented effects artist can use as references for accurate compositing. Everywhere always looks so empty, to save on the complexity of the background effects work to be done. I kept thinking about LazyTown, except the sparseness of that show’s backgrounds was a strong artistic choice to create a fun storybook aesthetic. Wicked has no such identity, and represents a new low in the genre of ‘spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the worst-looking movie you’ve ever seen.’ In this way and the others discussed before, it really feels like the heart of this movie is buried underneath miles of corporate concessions, small-c conservative Hollywood conventions and a filmmaking-by-boardroom approach until it’s near totally obscured and spoiled, like many expensive beautiful paints being overmixed into the plainest neutral brown. It’s so over!
