Strong leads and agile musical numbers can't fully colorize the first half of Wicked

The moment in the 1939 film version of The Wizard Of Oz where Dorothy Gale emerges from the sepia-toned world of Kansas into the Technicolor splendor of a faraway fantasyland is probably one of the five most broadly indelible American movie images in the medium’s history. Any subsequent work dealing with the Land of Oz, no matter how revisionist or formally unconnected to the 1939 film, must compete with that collective cultural memory. It’s only natural, then, that director Jon M. Chu, in adapting the alternate-Oz Broadway musical Wicked to the big screen, would attempt to fuel the imaginations of tomorrow with all the lushness studio money can buy: dim contrast, washed-out pinks and greens, and the kind of overall white-haze overcast look that renders images clear but utterly muted, no matter how many different colors are technically emblazoned across the screen. Wicked has plenty of practical sets, costumes, and make-up, and through the ineffable magic of digital moviemaking, most of it still looks like those Marvel movies they shoot in Georgia parking lots.

Is Chu suffering from chromophobia? His previous Broadway adaptation, the otherwise wonderful In The Heights, had a similar drain in its daylight scenes, rendering a too-damn-hot New York City about as sweltering-looking as an overcast late-October morning. Wicked is even more full of diffusing white sunlight, like an antiseptic imitation of Janusz Kamiński; even when the characters enter the richer, crazier tones of the Emerald City, the movie stubbornly resists anything resembling full saturation. Wicked makes the old Wizard Of Oz look even more like a vivid original, while the newer movie unfolding in front of us looks like a faded memory.

This is all the more confounding because otherwise, Chu is easily among the best filmmakers to build a career on the contemporary mainstream musical. Deep into their filmographies, directors like Rob Marshall and Adam Shankman still appear overwhelmed by the demands of translating a big production number onto a bigger screen. Chu knows where to place his camera, and in a contrast with his peers that may be even more important, he understands the hows and whys of cutting together the images for both spatial sense and structural playfulness. Split-screens, match cuts, spectacle-courting wides; it may sound rudimentary, but Chu’s musical sequences have real flow, even when—as with Wicked—the songs themselves are largely forgettable, apart from a showstopper apiece (one comic, one dramatic) for its two powerhouse stars.

Those stars are Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, swapping in for Broadway’s Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth as the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda, Good Witch of the North, respectively. These familiar titles aren’t their given names, however. They start out the movie as green-skinned, dark-clothed Elphaba (Erivo) and blonde-haired, pink-dressed Galinda (Grande), new students at Shiz University, which is apparently some kind of semi-magical higher-ed institution for adults well into their 30s. (At least the movie is uniform: Not a single principal character looks like an actual college-aged human.) Elphaba initially arrives to chaperone her sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode), but when headmistress Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) catches a glimpse of Elphaba’s considerable power, she insists on enrolling her, assigning Galinda as her roommate. An initial mutual hatred develops into a more complicated friendship, and eventually they visit the Emerald City at behest of the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum).

If this doesn’t sound like much story for a 160-minute movie, that’s because Chu’s Wicked somehow runs the same length as the full Broadway production despite only adapting the first act. (Yes, the title card specifies “Part One” even if the ads don’t.) The time-killing sprawl is evident from the jump; the movie opens not with a concise curtain-raising number, but a mish-mash of exposition, flashbacks, and the musical equivalent of throat-clearing. It’s yet another instance of treating source materials not as a starting place for creative interpretation, but a holy text that might only expand to fit its supersized to-go container. It makes sense that the show would garner this respect, even if it’s not exactly Hamilton-level; Wicked has a clear influence on a number of other pop-cultural phenomena, most explicitly Frozen. Yet it does Wicked little favor to allow it to galumph around freely, often halting the rhythm of Chu’s natural musicality.

Wicked holds together because of that showmanship—and because it boasts two committed performers to show off. Initially Erivo seems awfully self-serious for material attempting to rig an awkward discrimination metaphor that positions her character’s disabled, Black sister as significantly less oppressed than the made-up other category of uniquely green-skinned woman (and also the talking animals that Oz has begun to turn against). But Elphaba's earnest ache for connection shines through the movie’s convolutions, and watching Erivo gathering confidence makes satisfying use of film’s closer-up vantage. Grande, meanwhile, gets to do the fun stuff: preening, flittering, hair-tossing that dips her whole body backwards for some reason. A gifted mimic, she has notes of a Chenoweth imitation, but her pop-star background lends the performance a self-mocking regality of its own. In classic YA fashion, neither lead has much chemistry with Jonathan Bailey, playing the object of their mutual affection. The way they regard each other—progressing through wariness, anger, affection, and sadness—has vastly more romantic spark.

The ill-developed love triangle and barely-there relationship between Elphaba and her sister speak to the ways Wicked attempts to rationalize L. Frank Baum’s whimsical world of Oz, which on the page is really more Lewis Carroll than J.K. Rowling. That’s a weakness of the source material that no mega-movie based on a mega-show is likely to resolve—which is all the more reason for the movie to clear up its digital haze and dive further into eye-filling style. Is it enough for Wicked to be a better version of those live-action Disney remakes, one with more tactile sets, defter direction, and better leading performances? Maybe, but it’s hard not to think of how the whole thing might have taken full advantage of Chu’s stylistic agility, rather than fighting for the right to be continued. At one point, Galinda is derided for prioritizing “form over content.” It’s an accidentally telling line in a movie with pretty good form that ultimately submits to being cross-platform content.

Director: John M. Chu

Writers: Winnie Holzman, Dana Fox

Starring: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Marissa Bode, Bowen Yang, Bronwyn James, Keala Settle, Peter Dinklage

Release date: November 22, 2024