Review: What a film about defying gravity, Wicked Is Leaden

IIt’s a trait to feel like you’re being held hostage by someone else’s nostalgia. The stage show Evil is loved by many; it’s been playing on Broadway for 20 years and counting, which means one lot of little girls, and others, have thankfully fallen under the poppy-induced spell of Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz’s musical about the complex origins of the not-really-so-bad Wicked Witch of the West. Legions of kids and adults have been humming and grooving along to tracks like “Popular” and “Defying Gravity,” one a shimmering take on what it takes to be the most loved girl in school, the other a peppy empowerment ballad about charting your own course in life. The film adaptation of Evil—directed by John M. Chu and starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande—will increase the reach of the material and give many more people the chance to fall in love with it. Or not.

It is the “or not” that will likely be the minority. But if you fail to feel the transformative magic of Chu’s Evil, there are some good reasons: the film is so aggressively colorful, so manic in its insistence that it’s OK to be different, that it practically beats you down. And this is only part of the saga – the second part will arrive in November 2025. Evil does a distinctive but grim magic trick: it turns other people’s cherished Broadway memories into a lingering form of punishment for the rest of us.

Read more: Collapse Evil‘s iconic songs with composer Stephen Schwartz

Evil the film is woven together by many complex moving parts, and some of them work better than others. Grande plays Glinda, the Good Witch of Oz – but is she really that good? The backstory that will consume all two hours and 41 minutes of this film – about the same time as the stage musical, although again this is only the first half – almost proves otherwise. This is really the story of Elphaba, played by Erivo, who at the beginning of the film is a reticent young woman with dazzling supernatural powers. The problem is that she has green skin, which makes her a target of scorn and derision, an outcast. Elphaba is a reimagining of the character first brought to life by L. Frank Baum in his extraordinary and wonderfully strange turn-of-the-century Oz books, and later portrayed in the venerable 1939 The Wizard of Oz by Margaret Hamilton. Evil– whose source material is roughly Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West– is built around the idea that Elphaba wasn’t born bad, but was merely forced to make decisions that set her on a different path than the insufferable goody-two-shoes Glinda, her nemesis turned frenemy turned friend. The story’s subtext—or rather its glaring bold type—is that we are all shaped by our choices, which are at least in part determined by our response to how others treat us.

But you’ve probably figured it out Evil not for its leaden life lessons, but for the songs, for the lavish, flashy sets, for the chance to see two formidable performers spar and spar. Grande infuses the role of Glinda with an uncomfortably powder-room perkiness: As the film opens, she enters Oz’s Shiz University, an institution whose radically uncool name will forever taint, alas, the classic and vaguely scatological phrase “It’s the shizz. ” Shiz is where kids come to learn magic spells and stuff; Glinda arrives with a million pink suitcases thinking she’s going to be the star student.

Not so fast: Elphaba has also arrived at the school, but not as a student. She’s just there to drop off her younger sister, Nessa Rose (Marissa Bode). Their father, Governor Thropp (Andy Nyman), has hated Elphaba since the day she was born—remember, she’s green and therefore different– while loving Nessa Rose, who is admittedly so kind and lovely that it’s impossible not to love her. Elphaba actually adores her. And the fact that she uses a wheelchair makes their father even more overprotective of her. But when Elphaba sets out to get her little sister settled in Shiz, her amazing powers—they flow from her like electricity, especially when she’s angry or frustrated—catch the school’s superstar professor, the cool, elegant Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh ). Morrible immediately enrolls Elphaba in Shiz University, making her Glinda’s unwelcome roommate (who at this point is named Galinda, for reasons the movie will explain if you’re curious, or even if you’re not).

Glinda has no use for Elphaba and goes overboard in making her Shiz experience unbearable. She relegates her roommate to a small, dark corner of their shared quarters and literally overwhelms her with mountains of frippery and furbelows, mostly in vibrant shades of pink. In a pivotal scene, she tries to humiliate Elphaba at a school dance and then inexplicably goes soft; the two become almost-friends. But there’s always an undercurrent of competitiveness there – Glinda isn’t half as gifted as Elphaba is, and she’s the opposite of down-to-earth. Grande has fun with Glinda’s sugary, over-the-top manipulations: she has the fluttering eyelids of a twinkling doll and the twisted elegance of a music box ballerina. But her lap is getting tiring. There is so much flashing, flashing and pushing in Evil that I came out of it feeling grateful—if only for a moment—for the stark ugliness of reality.

There are so many characters, so many plot points, so many metaphors in it Evil– they are like a traffic pile of flying monkeys. Jonathan Bailey plays a rich, handsome prince who, upon his heralded arrival at the school, takes an instinctive liking to Elphaba, but ends up going steady with Glinda, who practically hypnotizes him into compliance. Jeff Goldblum plays the Wizard of Oz, a lanky charmer who can be a fool at best and a puppet of fascists at worst. Peter Dinklage voices a beleaguered professor-goat at the school, Dr. Dillamond. Oz is a society where animals can talk; they are as intelligent as humans, or more, and they mingle freely in society. But someone in Oz is looking to stop all that, launching a campaign to silence all animals, and Dr. Dillamond becomes their unfortunate victim.

In the meantime, the big news is about Evil— No one is all good or all bad — flashes so blatantly that you’re not sure what any of it means. Metaphorical truisms ping around on purpose: It’s OK, even good, to be different! Those who know best will always be the first to be silenced! The popular girl doesn’t always win! It is tempting to interpret Evil as a wise civics lesson, a fable for our time, but its ideas are so slippery, so easily adaptable to even the most blinkered political views, that they have no real value. Meanwhile, there are as many song and dance numbers as you could wish for, and possibly more. Chu – also director of Crazy rich Asians and In the Heightsboth films more entertaining than this one – staging them lavishly, to the point where your ears and eyeballs wish he would stop.

And yet – there is Erivo. She is the one force in Evil it didn’t make me feel broken. As Elphaba, she channels something like real pain instead of just showing self-pity. You feel with her in her greenness, in her persistent state of being an outsider, in her frustration at being underappreciated and unloved. Erivo almost rises above the material, and not just on a broom handle. But not even she is strong enough to counter the entertainment cyclone with a capital E swirling around her. For a film whose theme song is an advertisement for the joys of defying gravity, Wicked is surprisingly leaden, with a promise of more of the same to come. It isn’t.