Wicked Is As Enchanting As It Is Exhausting

Jon M. Chu has made one of the great musicals of our time, a phantasmagorical coming-of-age journey into a land of wide-eyed enchantment, wild dance moves, and colorful, magic bubbles. That movie was called Step Up 3D, and it came out in 2010. Though dismissed by critics at the time, that dance-off sequel feels more like a masterpiece with each passing year, an early demonstration of its director’s ability to spin new worlds through movement and mood. These talents also served Chu well with his pandemic-hobbled 2021 adaptation of In the Heights. There, the rough-edged musical numbers, blending realism with reverie, gave that ode to the immigrant community of Washington Heights a tumble-down poignancy.

Chu’s latest, Wicked, is pretty good, too, though one misses the sheer attack of his previous work. A massive (some might say swollen) spectacle, it cleaves the long-running hit Broadway musical in two, with the movie’s finale coming at the sole act break of the play. Act Two onstage is quite a bit shorter than Act One, so one suspects Wicked: Part Two will require new numbers and plot threads to match the heft of the first half. It would be quite a feat: This Wicked is huge in every possible way. Fans of the show will likely adore it, but it only sporadically achieves the demented energy that marks Chu’s best work and that makes the great modern movie musicals sing.

Despite being a lot longer, the film is ruthlessly faithful to the play. It opens with all of Oz celebrating the liquidation of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, who will eventually be played by Cynthia Erivo. That’s pretty much where the original Wizard of Oz left matters, but soon, Ariana Grande’s Glinda the Good, Elphaba’s presumed mortal enemy, floats down in her pink bubble to recount the story of how she and the Witch knew each other back when they were young students at Shiz University. Glinda is reluctant to speak at first. The walls of Oz’s villages are festooned with anti-Witch propaganda. (“She’s watching you,” blares one poster featuring a sinister picture of Elphaba.) And while Glinda’s tale is meant to answer the question, “Why does wickedness happen?,” what it ultimately reveals is that Elphaba wasn’t wicked at all — that she was just a girl who was rejected by those around her because of her green skin, and that there was more to her war against the powers that be in Oz than was allowed to meet the eye.

Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, on which the show is loosely based, was written not long after the first Gulf War, and the author has said he was partly inspired by Western press reports repeatedly comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler as a justification for invading Iraq. At the same time, the book goes to great lengths to show Oz’s gradual decline into fascism at the hands of our old friend the Wizard. The stage version, which premiered in 2003, in turn seemed to reflect the racism in the air amid the aftermath of 9/11 and the ramp-up to the Iraq War. (“The best way to bring folks together is to give them an enemy,” is a line from both the film and the play.) I suspect this new movie will itself resonate in new ways. The allegory of Wicked is both blunt enough and vague enough that we can adapt it to any sociopolitical environment we want. That’s not a knock; several masterpieces by George Orwell — a clear influence on Maguire’s book — have met the same fate over the years. And both L. Frank Baum’s original novel of the Wizard of Oz and the classic 1939 film have fed many interpretations since time immemorial, including a charmingly persistent theory that Baum’s real aim was to attack turn-of-the-century American monetary policy. (No, really.)

In other words, the tension between dark metaphor and the sickly sweet fantasyland of Oz has always been there. It’s easy to see why. The world over the rainbow is just too surreal and strange to ever be taken at face value — it’s got to mean something. Perhaps that’s why Chu hasn’t tried to give his movie Oz any genuine reality or weight. Even as his camera swoops through the skies, skims across rivers, or charges through villages, it all feels like pleasant, inconsequential background noise. Anybody expecting Chu to breathe life into Oz the way Peter Jackson did with Middle-earth in his Lord of the Rings epics will surely be disappointed.

For all its ambition and cinematic pyrotechnics, Wicked doesn’t feel like it’s been opened up that much from the source, maybe because the play is already huge and eye-popping. So much of the show consists of speeches, tours, grand expositions — people speaking and singing to and with large crowds. That makes some organic sense in a stage production, but it can be wearying when translated to film. Reinforcing the sense of overarching allegory, the population of Oz is basically a blank mass of imbeciles, easily manipulated and fickle to a fault. They’re all chorus, all the time. Meanwhile, we keep waiting for the main characters to show some delicacy of emotion, something subtle and human, something to make us care for them beyond their status as icons or symbols.

When things do occasionally quiet down, the actors shine. With her pagoda-roof eyelashes and her quicksilver physicality, Grande gives real comic shape to Glinda’s popular-girl frivolity. She also pokes fun at her own terrific vocal range, tossing errant high notes into simple statements like “I already have a private su-iiite.” Erivo arguably has the harder task. Elphaba is the one who goes from rejection and sadness to love and stridency and, finally, rage. Hers is not a particularly nuanced performance, but this is not a particularly nuanced character; Elphaba’s melancholy is as much part of Wicked’s spectacle as are the armies of flying monkeys or the swirling shots of the Emerald City. And one of the film’s biggest moments is also its quietest. When she finds herself ostracized at a school party because of the soon-to-be familiar black hat Glinda has made her wear, Elphaba creates her own rhythmic dance movements, without any music for accompaniment. Onstage, it’s a relatively quick bit, played as a prelude to the two protagonists starting to get closer. Here, it’s the movie’s emotional high point, as Chu and Erivo turn Elphaba’s glower from an expression of defeat into one of defiance, thus laying the groundwork for her eventual transformation.

I’ll admit, I would have enjoyed Wicked a lot more if I were a bigger fan of the songs. But aside from a couple of high points, such as the immortal anthem of rebellion “Defying Gravity,” that ubiquitous, tinny faux-pop Broadway beat turns me off instantly. Luckily, the songs don’t need my blessing. They’ve endured long enough that the studio has planned sing-along screenings across the country for later in December. And when Chu does sink his teeth into the numbers, something wonderful can emerge. The film’s performance of “What Is This Feeling?”, a showstopper in which our two heroes express their initial loathing of each other, seems to glide effortlessly from late-night split-screen bickering to a rollicking, school-wide extravaganza where everything becomes rhythm: click-clacking silverware, twiddling fingers, stomping feet, rolling chairs, and screeching tables. This is clearly the work of the magnificent madman who made two Step Up movies.

Erivo and Grande are, of course, great singers, and they give their all to the songs, for which their vocals were reportedly recorded live on set. They can’t afford not to: there’s so much more of Wicked here, with several musical numbers having been expanded on their journey from stage to screen.

The seams don’t show, but the movie can still drag. The grandiosity of theatrical spectacle relies on a sense of wonder very different from the awe generated by the moving image. Being in the same room as the smoke and the cherry pickers and the performers belting out the tunes has a ritualistic fervor that is nothing like the experience of watching something unfold in two dimensions. Wicked the movie’s images are big, to be sure, but they’re also often shallow; they don’t draw our attention further into the image, nor do they inspire curiosity about this world. They impress in scale but not in depth. And the film keeps hammering home themes it’s established, sometimes to its detriment. Elphaba’s feelings of inadequacy and undesirability become less convincing after several notable character turns, especially once we sense where everything is headed. That is perhaps Wicked’s greatest problem. Despite its status as a revisionist reinvention of a classic text, so much of it feels preordained, even programmed. We wait not for revelations or surprises, but for affirmation and escalation. Wicked is as enchanting as it is exhausting.