The Wizard of Oz might be the movie I’ve seen most in my life. From before I can remember, I grew up watching it every year on TV, and even after the annual broadcast moved to cable in the 1990s, I kept watching it almost every year on home video.Yet I walked into the new movie of Wicked knowing almost nothing.
I knew Wicked was a revisionist take on the Wicked Witch of the West character and that it was based on the mega-hit 2003 stage musical, but I’ve never seen the play, listened to any of the songs by composer Stephen Schwartz, or read the 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire upon which the play was based. I wasn’t sure what to expect or whether it would even make any sense to me.
Even so, director John M. Chu’s big budget film adaptation won me over easily.
It turns out that Wicked is the story of the complicated odd-couple relationship between Galinda Upland (pop singer Ariana Grande), who will grow up to be The Wizard of Oz’s Glinda the Good Witch, and Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo of Harriet, Broadway’s The Color Purple, and a juicy role opposite Jeff Bridges in Bad Times at the El Royale), herself destined to become the Wicked Witch of the West. The two future witches meet as sorcery students at Shiz University, where Galinda is a beautiful, popular, and very blonde daughter of wealth and privilege, and Elphaba is a green-skinned and nerdy outcast. They’re opposites who rub each other the wrong way at first but who eventually develop an unexpected connection – before forces beyond their control conspire to tear them apart.
The story of Wicked has all the problems of modern blockbuster fantasy films, but somehow it all works here. Even though Schwartz was working on the Broadway musical before George Lucas infected Hollywood with prequelitis with The Phantom Menace, he seems to have caught all the cliches anyway. We see where the Wicked Witch gets her hat and broom, as well as the origin of the famous sparkly shoes and why the witch became, you know, wicked.
Yes, Wicked has the stupid, allegedly realistic, desaturated colors of a modern superhero movie, but there are enough large-scale physical sets that the extensive plasticky CGI makes sense. Everything looks so artificial, like the Barbie movie or, more to the point, the original Wizard of Oz, that the flatly lit digital backgrounds seem like the old-school matte paintings they in essence are.
Wicked is an ambitious Hollywood musical of epic scale that makes me want to say “They don’t make ’em like this anymore.” Only, they’ve never made ’em this way outside India’s Bollywood, where any kind of story can become a musical. Like a Bollywood production, Wicked boasts lavish production values, exquisite costumes, giant sets, and hundreds of dancers.
The story of The Wizard of Oz took place in a huge fantasy world akin to Tolkien or Harry Potter, but the limitations of 1930s special effects always made it feel like everything was happening on a stage. Wicked plays on a much grander scale. It’s as big as any modern fantasy movie, with both thrilling action sequences and massive musical numbers.
The extended length of the film also contributes to the epic fantasy scale of the story.
Wicked, Part 1 is long. It’s apparently longer than the entire Broadway show, despite being only the first act of the play. Yet director Chu (Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights) keeps the story moving with forward momentum — and it never felt long.
When the words “to be continued” appeared on the screen after 2 hours and 40 minutes, the audience burst into applause. As an act break that sets us up for a one-year intermission, the ending was arguably more satisfying than any cliffhanger since Avengers: Infinity War. Recent “Part 1s” like Across the Spider Verse, Dune, and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning have all felt fragmented, but this feels like a natural break in the story. I’m ready for another two and half hours.
The music and dancing were excellent. A musical can never be better than its songs, and Schwartz (Godspell and Pippin) delivers showstoppers like “Defying Gravity,” “Popular,” and “Dancing Through Life.” And both lead actresses absolutely devour their roles. Ariana Grande is hilarious as an air-headed narcissist and Cynthia Erivo is a powerful and fierce presence with a tender-hearted core.
And, boy, can both of these divas sing! I fell in love with them both individually and even more with them together as a duo.
Chu has specialized in directing dance movies and musicals (Step Up 2: The Streets, anyone?), but he has a polarizing style. While he creates strong images in each shot, Chu is focused primarily on the emotion of the scene not the dancing itself. The result is a movie of powerful closeups and medium shots of a scene where amazing dance choreography is happening in the background. It’s not my favorite way of shooting a musical number, but it’s undeniably emotionally effective. In conception and even execution, Wicked is awfully close to looking like a “live action remake” of some Oz knockoff, but somehow, despite naively dancing directly into all these traps – the unnecessary prequel “explanations” and easter eggs, the overuse of CGI, the excessive length – the movie unexpectedly makes it all work. Everyone else is struggling to achieve what Wicked makes look effortless. Part 1 left me swooning for more.
