‘Wicked’ is as enchanting as it is exhausting

Photo: Universal Pictures

Jon M. Chu has created one of the great musicals of our time, a phantasmagoric coming-of-age journey into a land of wide-eyed enchantment, wild dance moves and colorful, magical bubbles. That movie was called Step Up 3Dand it came out in 2010. Though panned by critics at the time, the danced 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. Those talents also served Chu well with his Pandemic 2021 adaptation of In the Heights. There, the raw musical numbers that mixed realism with reverie gave this ode to the immigrant community of Washington Heights a descending poignancy.

Chu’s latest, Evilis also quite good, although one misses the big attack of his earlier work. A massive (some might say bloated) spectacle, it splits the long-running hit Broadway musical in two, with the film’s finale coming at the play’s only intermission. The second act on stage is quite a bit shorter than the first act, so one might expect Wicked: Part Two will require new numbers and plot threads to match the heaviness of the first half. That would be quite a feat: This Evil is huge in every possible way. Fans of the show will likely love it, but it only sporadically achieves the demented energy that marks Chu’s best work and makes the great modern movie musicals sing.

Despite being much 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. It’s pretty much where the original is The Wizard of Oz left cases behind, but soon Ariana Grande’s Glinda the Good, Elphaba’s supposed mortal enemy, floats down in her pink bubble to tell the story of how she and the witch knew each other when they were young students at Shiz University. Glinda is reluctant to speak at first. The walls of Oz’s villages are adorned with anti-witch propaganda. (“She’s watching over you,” reads a poster with an eerie image of Elphaba.) And while Glinda’s tale is meant to answer the question, “Why does evil happen?” what it ultimately reveals is that Elphaba was not evil at all. – that she was just a girl rejected by those around her because of her green skin, and that there was more to her war against the powers of Oz than met the eye.

Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, on which the series is loosely based, was written in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, and the author have said he was partly inspired by Western press reports that repeatedly compared 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, instead 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 people together is to give them a really good enemy,” is a line from both the film and the play.) I suspect this new film will resonate in new ways. The allegory of Evil is both obtuse enough and vague enough that we can adapt it to any sociopolitical environment we want. It is not a stroke; 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 Wizard of Oz novel and the classic 1939 film have fueled many interpretations since time immemorial, including a charmingly persistent theory that Baum’s real goal was to attack turn-of-the-century American monetary policy. (No, really.)

In other words, the tension between dark metaphor and the sickly sweet fantasy land 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 must mean something. Perhaps that’s why Chu hasn’t tried to give his film Oz any real reality or weight. Even when his camera whizzes through the sky, skims across rivers, or whizzes through villages, it all feels like pleasant, insignificant background noise. Anyone expecting Chu to breathe life into Oz like Peter Jackson did with Middle-earth in his The Lord of the Rings epos will surely be disappointed.

For all its ambition and cinematic pyrotechnics, Evil doesn’t feel that much has been opened up from the source, perhaps because the piece is already huge and eye-catching. So much of the show consists of speeches, tours, large displays – people talking and singing to large crowds. It makes some organic sense in a stage production, but it can be tiresome when translated to film. To reinforce the sense of overall allegory, the people of Oz are basically an empty mass of imbeciles, easily manipulated and fickle to a fault. They are all choirs, all the time. Meanwhile, we keep waiting for the main characters to show some delicate emotion, something subtle and human, something that makes us care about them beyond their status as icons or symbols.

When things occasionally go quiet, the actors shine. With her pagoda-roof eyelashes and her mercurial physicality, Grande gives real comic form to Glinda’s popular-girl frivolity. She also pokes fun at her own amazing vocal range, throwing errant high notes into simple statements like “I already have a private su-iiite.” Erivo arguably has the more difficult task. Elphaba is the one who goes from rejection and sadness to love and strife and finally rage. Hers is not a particularly nuanced performance, but it is not a particularly nuanced character; Elphaba’s melancholy is equally very much a part of Evilspectacle, like the armies of flying monkeys or the swirling shots of the Emerald City. And one of the film’s greatest 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 moves with no accompanying music. On stage, it is played relatively quickly as a prelude to the two main characters starting to get closer to each other. Here, it is the film’s emotional high point, as Chu and Erivo transform Elphaba’s glare from an expression of defeat to one of defiance, thus laying the groundwork for her eventual transformation.

I admit, I would have enjoyed it Evil much more if I was a bigger fan of the songs. But apart from a few highlights, such as the immortal anthem of rebellion “Defying Gravity”, the ubiquitous, tinny faux-pop Broadway beat instantly turns me off. Fortunately, the songs don’t need my blessing. They’ve held out long enough that the studio has scheduled sing-along screenings across the country for later in December. And when Chu sinks 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 for each other, seems to slide effortlessly from late-night split-screen bickering to a rollicking, school-wide extravaganza where everything turns to rhythm : clicking silverware, spinning fingers, stomping feet, rolling chairs and screeching tables. This is clearly the work of the magnificent madman who made two Step up film.

Erivo and Grande are great singers, of course, and they give their all to the songs, for which their vocals were reportedly recorded live on set. They cannot afford not to: there is so much more of it Evil here, where several musical numbers have been expanded on their journey from stage to screen.

The seams do not show, but the film can still pull. Magnificence in theatrical performance depends on a sense of wonder that is very different from the awe generated by the moving image. Being in the same room as the smoke and the cherry picking and the performers belting out the tunes has a ritual fervor unlike the experience of watching something unfold in two dimensions. Evil the film’s images are certainly large, but they are also often superficial; they do not draw our attention further into the picture, nor do they arouse curiosity about this world. They impress in scale, but not in depth. And the film keeps hammering away at the themes it has established, sometimes to its detriment. Elphaba’s feelings of inadequacy and undesirability become less compelling after several notable character turns, especially as we sense where everything is headed. Maybe it is Evilbiggest problem. Despite its status as a revisionist reinvention of a classic text, so much of it feels predetermined, even programmed. We are not waiting for revelations or surprises, but for confirmation and escalation. Evil is as enchanting as it is exhausting.