Wicked (Chu, 2024)

Written by Tom Augustine.

About a year ago I caught The Wizard of Oz on television. It was the first time I’d watched it in twenty or so years, and I was blindsided by the emotional wallop that it packed. All of a sudden, as Dorothy bids farewell to the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion, I was a mess. The Wizard of Oz is an American ur-text, but also a foundational work of cinema itself, one of those miraculous films that formed the basis upon which we assess all cinema that came after it. It is so pure, its emotions so elemental. It is also the first film to use Technicolor, a deeply cinematic, now extinct tool which would have been positively overwhelming to audiences used to black and white film, and whose images maintain a richness that seems totally beyond the imaginings of today’s studios and blockbuster helmsmen. During the buildup for Wicked, an adaptation of the beloved-in-its-own-right stage musical that famously starred Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, a Tweet made the rounds that placed the images of trailers for the new film against the original The Wizard of Oz. The contrast was stark. Per said Tweeter: ‘We have strayed so far from God’s light’. 

Wicked opens with a promise to tell ‘the whole story’, a statement rendered utterly ironic by the fact that this is just part one of a two-part story, needlessly bloating and bisecting the sub-three hour musical into what I can only imagine will eventuate as a nearly six-hour project. Directed by Jon M. Chu, who has become a go-to for glitzy, high-production value films since the success of Crazy Rich Asians (the best film he ever made, to my mind, remains the scrappy, urban dance flick Step Up 2: The Streets all the way back in 2008, and its sequel Step Up 3D), the story replaces the stage musical’s iconic stars Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth with Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, playing Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Glinda the Good Witch, respectively. The film flashes back from the death of Elphaba in The Wizard of Oz to the youth of the two witches, where they attend the unfortunately-named ‘Shiz Academy’, beginning as enemies forced to room together before finding common ground and a gentle, heartwarming friendship amidst a changing, semi-totalitarian Oz. In an unexpectedly timely subplot, there’s a growing sentiment against talking animals, embodied here largely by a goat professor voiced by Peter Dinklage, who are being demonised in human circles for their abilities to speak. Repeatedly in the film, the sentiment that in order to have unity, the people must have a common enemy, is vocalised – an idea that wouldn’t be unwelcome at a Trump rally (or more locally, an ACT conference).

Director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights) adapts the smash-hit Oz-set musical for the big screen. Glimmers of the stage musical’s power and magnetism appear here and there, particularly in the performance of Ariana Grande, but are too often buried beneath a blandly digital, overly-busy visual palette and a bloated runtime.

Much of what works about Wicked is what has carried over from the stage – the general push-pull of the relationship between the two witches, and, naturally, the songs. But in Chu’s vision of the story, even those elements are frequently drowned beneath the need for empty, dully-rendered spectacle. Much has been made of the film’s watery colour-pallette and visual style, thin gruel when considering the visual pedigree of the original Oz, and even subsequent efforts to bring it to the screen. It brings me no pleasure to report that this visual approach is only slightly improved inside the cinema, with a dull, ‘photo-realistic’ sheen that leaves no room for genuine evocativeness, and mostly recalls Disney live-action monstrosities like The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. Gone are the expressionistic flourishes, the vibrant slashes of colour, the production design that speaks to the world of dreams and imagination, markers that feel so vital to the movie musical genre as a whole. This is best summed up by the fact that the animals in the film are CG-rendered ‘live-action’ creations á la Disney’s The Lion King update. The same uncanny, unpleasant sensation one gets watching those films follows on here. Much like his (very good) Step Up movies, and his deeply mediocre In the Heights, Chu proves he has the chops for directing a musical scene with vigorous, exciting camera movement, placing the camera-eye in the body of a dancer, but when so much of it looks like a commercial, all the energetic whips and pans in the world won’t save you.

At the core of the story is an affecting story of friendship, and the film comes alive in scenes where our two stars bond, particularly in musical highlight ‘Popular’. This is largely down to a magnificent performance by Grande, who turns years of Nickelodeon training into some delicious physical comedy. She frequently feels like the only one in the film aware of what Wicked could and should be, and is positively magnetic in her total commitment. Erivo is less successful – she’s fine when playing off Grande, and certainly has the technical chops as a songstress, but her Elphaba feels a little distant, a little intellectual. Her two big belters – ‘Defying Gravity’ and ‘The Wizard and I’ fall flat, in spite of Erivo’s voice hitting every note with practised perfection. ‘Defying Gravity’, here presented as Part One’s climax, is brutally undercut by the film’s direction, which stifles the performance in a torrent of CGI activity and meaty exchanges of dialogue that render its impact tragically muffled. The less said about the sprawling supporting cast, the better – of the younger performers only Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey as a caddish young princeling with a secret heart of gold makes any kind of impression, while performances by Jeff Goldblum (as The Wizard himself) and Michelle Yeoh (as his sorceress second-in-command) are perfunctory beyond belief. 

Wicked’s most fatal flaw, however, is that aforementioned bloat. There’s no godly reason why this film should be hewn in two except in the name of profit – and that cynicism lends the entire enterprise a feeling of stringing the audience along. Without the propulsiveness of the musical’s run-time, there are large swathes of Wicked which drag unforgivably, all the way up to the ‘To Be Continued’ cliffhanger which elicited groans from my audience. This mercenary approach is marketed as giving fans of the original ‘more’ of what they love, but so little of what has been added provides nourishment of any sort. It’s a disappointingly corporate appropriation, a genetically modified crop; fake-looking and unnaturally engorged. Awards attention for Grande would be merited, however.

Wicked is in cinemas now.

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