Film review

  • Wicked

    Jon M Chu (2024)

    In the name of Oz, this is only part one!  I didn’t realise that when I sat down to watch Jon M Chu’s film.  I decided to see it to get an idea of what all the fuss is about:  Wicked is thriving at box offices worldwide (though I was one of only four audience members at a Curzon Richmond late-morning-into-early-afternoon screening).  The stage musical Wicked, first produced in 2003, has often been described as ‘long-running’; the movie version is certainly going to deserve the same epithet though it will mean something different.  I gather Wicked in the theatre runs a bit over two-and-a-half hours, including interval.  Universal’s screen adaptation has been ‘split into two parts to avoid cutting plot points and expand the characters’ journeys and relationships’ (Wikipedia).  So this Wicked runs 160 minutes; Wicked Part Two, scheduled for release in November 2025, reportedly lasts three hours.  MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) runs 102 minutes.  In other words, you could watch that classic three times over in the time it’ll take to sit through its obese offspring.  And you might well prefer to:  Wicked left this viewer longing for the nimble storytelling and moral clarity of the original, not to mention its songs and dancing.

    Wicked‘s early sequences reminded me of a conversation I overheard on the train home from work once.  A couple of American tourists asked an English commuter what above all she would recommend they see during their stay in London.  The woman promptly replied, ‘A West End show’.  She didn’t say which one:  it was obviously the generic ‘show’ experience that mattered.  In Jon Chu’s prologue, as the denizens of Oz celebrate the death of the Wicked Witch of the West, there are lots of moving bodies on the screen, lots of voices singing on the soundtrack, lots of grandiose wide-angle and overhead shots – and no connection between any of these elements.  So what, Chu seems to be saying:  there’s noisy spectacle galore – what else do you expect from a big musical?  At the centre of this frenzy is Glinda the Good Witch of the North, who confirms to the cheering throng the Wicked Witch’s demise.  A young woman then emerges from the crowd to ask a question that evidently discomfits Glinda:  is it true that she and the late witch, Elphaba, once were friends?  Glinda admits she did know Elphaba when they were young, triggering what must be one of the most extended flashbacks in movie history:  Wicked – part one anyway – never emerges from it.

    Galinda (sic – at this stage) Upland (Ariana Grande) meets Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo) at college.  Their alma mater is variously bewildering.  For a start, I misheard its name as Jizz University until I saw it on the screen as Shiz University, which wasn’t necessarily an improvement.  The ‘university’ students all wear blue school uniforms, except for pink-clad Galinda (who suggests a Barbie leftover) and soberly-dressed Elphaba, who hadn’t been planning to enrol anyway.  It’s the younger Thropp sister, paraplegic Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who’s the new student, brought to Shiz by their father (Andy Nyman) with Elphaba in tow.  But when Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), Dean of Sorcery, happens to spot Elphaba’s magic-making potential, she offers her special tuition in the dark arts.  The narrative might be a bit more streamlined if Madame Morrible, with her villainous name and a high-profile actress playing her, were the university principal.  Maybe it’s just because Shiz staff are rather thin on the ground that the principal’s a separate character but misnamed Miss Coddle (Keala Settle), a battleaxe, seems surplus to plot requirements.  It’s no surprise that, as she informs Elphaba, Madame Morrible doesn’t run her seminar every year because Shiz is no Hogwarts:  Elphaba and Galinda, the latter in spite of Morrible’s dislike of her, are the only students who seem to be majoring in necromancy.

    Elphaba becomes Madame Morrible’s student in the hope of graduating to a meeting with the Wizard of Oz – a means to the end of getting rid of the green skin whereby she’s stigmatised.  Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West in the MGM The Wizard of Oz was green, of course; and Wicked is the tale of how Elphaba became that Wicked Witch.  She was born green, the result of her mother drinking a green elixir, and that’s only the start of her unhappy backstory.  As Elphaba tells Glinda (sic – by now), her father was so anxious his second daughter shouldn’t have the same problem as the first that he made his wife consume a huge quantity of ‘milk flowers’ (snowdrops?) during pregnancy.  As a result, Mrs Thropp died in childbirth and Nessarose was born prematurely, before her legs had properly developed.  Elphaba thus sees herself as to blame for her sister’s disability.

    Although the film’s message that Elphaba is shunned because of her ‘difference’ comes through loud and clear, cultural shifts since the mid-1990s, when the American novelist Gregory Maguire published Wicked (the first book in his series The Wicked Years), dilute the symbolic meaning of the protagonist’s green skin.  Elphaba – the letters are Maguire’s zany compression of the name of L Frank Baum, the literary inventor of Oz – is different because of her skin colour.  Her ostracisation therefore signals racism but a Hollywood screen community, thirty years on, needs to be diverse.  Elphaba is played by a Black performer, as are a few of her fellow students.  Another student, with Asian features (Bowen Yang), is emphatically camp.  Neither he nor his classmates of colour nor wheelchair-bound Nessarose is on the receiving end of prejudice.  On the other hand, Boq Woodsman (Ethan Slater), a Munchkin who’s smitten with Glinda, isn’t tall but he’s no dwarf either since the casting of the Singer’s Midgets as Munchkins in the 1939 Oz is frowned upon now (never mind this consideration effectively deprives present-day dwarf performers of film work).  Cynthia Erivo’s make-up aside, Wicked‘s casting is meant to be colour-blind:  otherwise, you couldn’t fail to notice that the non-white people on the screen don’t stand up for Elphaba when white ones jeer at her.  Her predicament is specifically that her skin is green.  Not green as a metaphor for different – just green.

    Elphaba isn’t, however, the only victimised member of the Shiz community.  Another is her favourite teacher, Dr Dillamond, who teaches history:  at a time of scarce resources, he says, a people needs a common enemy and in Oz now that enemy is animals.  He knows what he’s talking about:  Dillamond is a CGI goat (voiced by Peter Dinklage), who’s also a scapegoat.  Someone chalks ‘Animals should be seen but not heard’ on his blackboard.  He confides to Elphaba that animals are losing their civil rights.  Galinda derides him for bleatingly mispronouncing her name as Glinda.  He’s soon forcibly ejected from the classroom and the university.  His replacement, Professor Nikidik (Colin Michael Carmichael), dispenses with teaching history and instead brings to class a caged lion cub on which to carry out live experimentation.  Nikidik is thwarted when Elphaba disperses poppy dust into the room, the opiate putting him and most of his students to sleep.  Elphaba and the one exception to that release the lion cub into the wild.  There’s no doubt the animals of Oz represent a politically oppressed minority but, rather as with Elphaba’s green skin, many viewers will likely construe their plight more narrowly and literally:  up with animal rights, down with vivisection.

    The ‘relationship’ of Wicked‘s two leads, so complex that it will need nearly six hours to be fully explored, seems rather a simple affair in this first film.  Elphaba, sharp-tongued as well as green-skinned, is disliked by nearly all her fellow students except her sister.  Galinda craves popularity and, supposedly ingratiating, succeeds in satisfying her craving.  They’re poles apart but made to share a room and at daggers drawn.  But they do share a romantic interest in Fiyero Tigelaar (Jonathan Bailey), a bad-boy royal prince chucked out of a succession of other colleges before coming to Shiz.  Galinda makes eyes at him from the word go; Elphaba is characteristically more guarded but Fiyero is the only one of her classmates who doesn’t succumb to the poppy dust.  The leads’ mutual loathing is transformed into friendship once Galinda, in a rare moment of self-reproach, gives Elphaba a makeover.  (In another such moment and in tribute to the banished Dr Dillamond, she drops the first ‘a’ in her name.)  The makeover works big time.  When Elphaba receives a personal invitation from the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum in waiting) and prepares to start her journey to the Emerald City, the Shiz student body is out in force, cheering her on her way.  I don’t think we’re meant to assume they’re delighted to see the back of her.

    Ozians speak an idiosyncratic English, adding extra syllables to words that don’t need them.  I don’t know if this is the invention of L Frank Baum or Gregory Maguire or Winnie Holzman, who wrote the book for the stage musical of Wicked.  Most of the extensions (manifestorium, pessimistical, pronouncify, and so on) aren’t up to much, though I did like the conflation hideodious.  Holzman shares the screenplay credit with Dana Fox but Stephen (Godspell) Schwartz must take sole responsibility for the musical numbers, words and music.  For quite a while at the start, these seem to be no more than bits of songs – as if Jon Chu were trying one out, finding it hopeless, trying another.  On reflection, though, this is probably just Chu’s trademark bulldozing style of direction, familiar from his previous movie musical, In the Heights (2021).  Even Wicked s climactic, ‘iconic’ number, Elphaba’s ‘Defying Gravity’, is chopped into sections, and its dramatic momentum compromised, so that Chu can give priority to a boring chase sequence – Elphaba pursued by the Wizard’s monkey guards – in the Emerald City.

    Despite all this, Cynthia Erivo gives a very good performance.  It’s not until Elphaba opens her mouth that any of the voices in Wicked seems to belong to a person at all.  Whether speaking or singing, Erivo has tonal variety like no one else in the film:  she even makes ‘I’m Not That Girl’, Elphaba’s lament that Fiyero prefers Glinda to her, affecting.  Jonathan Bailey, to his credit, shows that Fiyero is less sure than Elphaba of his feelings; there’s some emotional connection, very welcome in the circumstances, between him and Cynthia Erivo.  Ariana Grande acts competently but is a weirdly synthetic presence.  She’s like a figure in an animated film rather than a live-action one (an impression that the higher notes in her amazing vocal range somehow reinforce).  Michelle Yeoh’s Madame Morrible is rather bland.  Jeff Goldblum delivers the Wizard’s ‘A Sentimental Man’ pleasingly but, like everyone else, is swamped by Jon Chu’s hyperactive finale.

    Elphaba insists that Glinda accompany her to the Emerald City, where she tells the Wizard she’d rather help the animals of Oz than change the colour of her skin.  Madame Morrible also turns up there and urges Elphaba to try out her magic by casting a spell from a hallowed book of spells, the ‘Grimmerie’.  The spell goes wrong as the monkey guards sprout painful wings; worse, Elphaba learns, a Grimmerie spell can’t be reversed.  Morrible is revealed to be in cahoots with the Wizard, who intends to put the winged monkeys to good (ie bad) use, as his spies.  Glinda begs her bestie to make peace with the Wizard but Elphaba, horrified by what she has made happen, refuses.  In another attempt at magic, she levitates a broomstick and eventually flies away from the Emerald City into the West.  Back in Oz, the news of her wickedness spreads like wildfire.  These sequences move at such a hectic pace that I assumed Jon Chu was rushing to wrap everything up.  Then the dread words ‘To be continued …’ appeared.  I had noticed the ‘part one’ title on the screen 150-odd minutes previously but had been assuming I’d somehow missed a ‘part two’ announcement somewhere along the way.  I slunk out, mission not accomplished.  It remains to be seen whether, in twelve months’ time, this review is to be continued …

    11 December 2024

  • The Ploughman’s Lunch

    Richard Eyre (1983)

    Richard Eyre, Ian McEwan and Jonathan Pryce were still young men when they collaborated on this film.  All three have enjoyed careers of high distinction since – they’re now Sir Richard, Sir Jonathan and Mr McEwan, CH – but I found The Ploughman’s Lunch a hateful film in 1983 and I still do.  That is, most of the characters in it are hateful; the sense of superiority of the people who made it is even more so.

    Like his creators, the film’s protagonist is a young man going places.  James Penfield (Pryce), from a working-class background but with an Oxford degree, works in the BBC Radio 4 newsroom and has writing ambitions.  He authored a well-received chapter on the Berlin Airlift for a recent Cold War anthology; he’s now planning a book on the Suez Crisis.  Tom Gold (David de Keyser), the prospective publisher, takes him for lunch.  As James outlines the take on Suez that he has in mind, Gold interrupts, ‘You’re not a socialist then?’  James confirms he’s not, assuming that’s what Gold wants to hear.  When James has another lunch, with eminent left-wing historian and Suez expert Ann Barrington (Rosemary Harris), she phrases that question differently and James affirms his socialism.  It’s not only his two-facedness you notice from these exchanges.  Gold seems less interested in James’s politics than in the dessert trolley.  When James visits Ann, we already know that he wants to sleep with her daughter, Susan (Charlie Dore); the glint in Ann’s eye, as soon as she meets James, suggests it’s not only his leftist credentials that appeal to her.

    James’s pal from Oxford, the more posh Jeremy Hancock (Tim Curry), is also a journalist.  He humorously claims he gave James the material for his contribution to the Cold War book.  He advises James that ‘Your way into the daughter’s pants is through the mother, up the Suez Canal’.  He eventually betrays his friend by succeeding with Susan, who’s also posh, where James failed.  Ann Barrington may be a card-carrying socialist but she’s now married to Matthew Fox (Frank Finlay), Susan’s rolling-in-it stepfather, who makes television commercials; their home is a pile in the Norfolk countryside.  James pays next to no attention to his own humble father (Nat Jackley) and dying mother (Pearl Hackney), though he’s the apple of her eye.  It’s an embarrassing moment when he’s called to the phone in Norfolk and it’s his father on the line.  James’s first question is, ‘How did you get this number?’ (it’s a good question), and his second, ‘Well, don’t they have painkillers for that?’, before he ends the conversation as quickly as possible.  Ian McEwan’s original screenplay takes the view that, if you can’t be trusted in one aspect of your life you can’t be trusted in any.

    The narrative’s third lunch gives the film its title.  At one point in his Norfolk weekend, which sees James sharing a bed with Ann rather than Susan, Matthew asserts that Britain is now, if nothing else, the undisputed world leader in the art of TV adverts.  He works in London during the week and invites James to observe the making of a commercial.  During a break in filming, they go to a pub, where Matthew informs James that the food they’re eating illustrates the power of advertising:  ‘Ploughman’s lunch – traditional English fare … in fact it’s the invention of an advertising campaign they ran in the early sixties to encourage people to eat in pubs.  A completely successful fabrication of the past …’  Matthew then says he knows what’s going on between James and his wife, and that James has his permission to carry on carrying on (not that James does).  There’s no doubt this is a key episode in The Ploughman’s Lunch – not least because it epitomises the film’s own fraudulence and flimsiness.

    There’s no good reason for Matthew to invite James to watch the commercial being made or for James to accept the invitation.  If Matthew – a notorious philanderer, as his wife knows and as he freely admits – wanted to give his blessing to Ann enjoying a bit of adultery, why not tip James the wink in Norfolk?  The reason for the sequence is, of course, the ploughman’s lunch.  In an interview with Sight and Sound (Autumn 1983), McEwan explained that he told Richard Eyre about the meal’s commercial derivation and they agreed it would be ‘a good starting point’ for the film, which is centrally concerned with the ‘fake past’ and ‘contemporary “reality” as something that people make up’ (McEwan again) – in myths around the British Empire and Suez, in news coverage, and so on.  But disparaging the ploughman’s lunch as a ‘fabrication’, swallowed by the public in more ways than one, seems phoney in itself.  Didn’t ploughmen sometimes eat bread and cheese during the working day?  Was the man-in-the-street conned into thinking the man-in-the-field traditionally accompanied his lunch with a peel-off mini-pack of Branston pickle?

    So much of McEwan’s writing, even at this early stage of his career, is about showing off how much he knows.  Ann Barrington, when she isn’t eyeing James up, is regaling him with Suez lore and she’s not the only Suez expert in the film; James also goes to hear a lecture on the subject and records an interview with the lecturer (Bill Paterson).  So we’re left in no doubt that McEwan is well informed, too.  Even so, The Ploughman’s Lunch attracted attention on its original release because it was politically up-to-the-minute.  The first draft screenplay was written before the Falklands War, the script then rewritten to provide a running commentary on the Falklands campaign – on TV sets in the background to scenes, as well as in the BBC radio newsroom.  The film was released in Britain in May 1983, just a few weeks before Margaret Thatcher’s landslide win in the post-Falklands General Election.  But the real coup is that the story’s climax takes place at the 1982 Tory conference in Brighton.  This means not only that James, Jeremy and Susan (who works at LWT) are in the conference hall where actual delegates applaud speeches but also that there are walk-on appearances, on the margins of the conference, from the likes of Kenneth Baker and Paul Johnson (the ex-New Statesman editor and right-wing convert, not the Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies in his teenage years).

    Richard Eyre had official permission to film the conference.  McEwan told Sight and Sound that ‘We went in as ourselves, shooting a feature film, a romantic comedy!  They had seen the script and they had no objection’.  These words also have a weren’t-we-clever ring to them – as if McEwan and Eyre had pulled the wool over the eyes of Conservative Central Office.  But why would they have objected?  On paper, The Ploughman’s Lunch looks to be censuring left-wing hypocrisy, snobbery and unscrupulous careerism but not Conservatism as such.  Just about the only expression of James’s political agenda as a writer that comes across as plausible is when he tells the publisher Gold (ellipses indicate the latter’s continuing gateau preoccupation):

    ‘I’d like to break away … break away completely from … from all the moralising and talk of national humiliation that is now the standard line on Suez … I’d want to set out events as they happened.  The way I see it is this: the British Empire was an ideal.  It may have become totally obsolete by the middle of this century, but it wasn’t totally dishonourable to try and defend its remains and try and salvage some self-respect, which is what I think the Conservatives were trying to do.’

    Rather than disparaging Tory values in the script, the film relies on the likes of Francis Pym, Michael Heseltine and Margaret Thatcher to condemn themselves out of their own mouths in their speeches from the Brighton platform – which they do in no uncertain terms.  But Eyre’s camera in the conference hall is recording, principally, the last act of a romantic comedy.  A peculiarly sour romantic comedy, that is, as James witnesses clear evidence of Jeremy and Susan’s being an item.

    James and Jeremy’s poet friend Edward (Simon Stokes) seems decent but is innocuous, like James’s father.  Since anybody who’s somebody in The Ploughman’s Lunch is presented as reprehensible, you’re bound to wonder what Eyre and McEwan think might amount to nobler priorities or behaviour.  They’re not morally obliged, of course, to show their political hand but if they’re not going to, they might at least show a bit of sympathy towards their characters.  When Susan, after telling James about her family, then asks about his, he says both his parents are dead.  This breathtaking callousness may be meant to signal James’s shame about his humble origins but it’s anyone’s guess:  we get no idea of what makes him tick.  His careerism gets to seem pretty half-hearted, too.  He dashes into the LWT building to meet Susan, who’s got hold of Suez newsreel archive to show him; once she puts it on, he soon loses interest in the screen in order to gaze at her.

    For what it is, the film is well acted but the characters are so circumscribed and dismissively written that it’s hard to enjoy any of the performers, though Tim Curry and Frank Finlay are the most naturally entertaining.  Jonathan Pryce, for all his strong presence, is opaque.  As Susan’s young stepbrother, Orlando Wells is as annoying as everyone else but just what the film-makers must have wanted, rattling off the kings and queens of England or telling his big sister what she’s doing wrong as they play chess.  Christopher Fulford is, as usual, good, in the small role of an overeager junior journalist in the newsroom.

    Eyre and McEwan’s appetite for disparaging James is insatiable.  His newsreader colleague (David Lyon), whose marriage has collapsed, is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  When he says his wife has left him, James asks what happened.  The newsreader doesn’t want to talk about it yet the ending of the conversation seems to be James’s fault because his concern is insincere.  Driving back from his first visit to Norfolk, he has a flat tyre – just outside a Greenham Common-type peace camp, where he borrows a jack.  When she finds out that he works for BBC, one of the women, Carmen (Sandra Voe), tells James how badly their campaign needs national media coverage and asks him to help.  He tells her he’s ‘news, not features – it might help if you could get yourselves attacked by the police’.  In other words, he shows his cynical true colours; the faces of Carmen and her colleague Betty (Libba Davies) show their realisation of what he’s like.  By the time they turn up again in a demo at the Tory conference, they’ve forgotten:  they smile at James who, to their astonishment, cuts them dead.

    The film is barely more interested in James’s mother than he is:  after that inconvenient phone call, there’s no further mention of her or his father (though enough time has passed for James to complete his Suez book and for Tom Gold to approve it).  Until the final scene, that is.  Cheap shots at the anti-hero continue right through to the closing shot.  He and his father stand at his mother’s graveside.  As a priest reads from the Book of Common Prayer, James glances, not very surreptitiously, at his watch.  Until they fall out over Susan, James and Jeremy spend a fair amount of extracurricular time together – attending a public poetry reading by Edward, playing squash.  At the reading, they’re convulsed with laughter when Edward takes questions from the audience and an elderly woman (Anna Wing) uncertainly asks how he gets his ideas.  They play squash for ten minutes before stopping for a cigarette break – they think it’s a scream when a coach (Ken Shorter) tells them they can’t smoke on the court.  We’re meant to find their conduct outrageous but James and Jeremy in these two sniggering scenes just made me think of Richard Eyre and Ian McEwan.

    6 December 2024

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