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