Wicked
Wicked: Part I

I was not prepared for how awful this would be. Of course, I went in knowing very little about the show, having never seen it or read Gregory Maguire's adult-themed alternate take on L. Frank Baum's classic children's story and the iconic MGM film The Wizard of Oz. But one can't avoid at least knowing something about Wicked if one existed in the Aughts. Plus, I spent more than a decade working with kids at an arts program, so while I didn't teach theater, I certainly had some familiarity with the songs kids auditioned with during that era. I had the basic understanding that Maguire's revisionist origin-story take on the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch of the North creates a backstory in which the two meet in college when they are forced to room together. The bubbly Glinda is perky and popular, while the green-skinned Elphaba is ostracized for her looks and personality. But by the end of the first act, the two become friends and travel to the Emerald City to meet the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Almost as unavoidable as hearing at least the choruses of a few of the show's songs, was the promotional tour for this movie undertaken by its stars, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, a charm offensive that seemed like a campaign to proove they were worthy of the roles that made origenated by Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth—performances that made those two Braodway stars into musical theater legends. The press tour seemed to work. From what I could tell, the early buzz on the Wicked movie was not very good, due mainly to the decision to split the show into two long films, and early reports that the cinematography by Alice Brooks (Tick, Tick ... Boom!, In the Heights) was spectacularly overbright and ugly. But as soon as skeptical audiences started to see the film, word of mouth, especially from the theater kids who grew up with it, was positive, and the movie became a big hit.

All I could tell from the Erivo/Grande love-fest press tour was that these two were incredibly strange-looking individuals, and nothing about seeing them gushing about the movie and each other made me want to see Wicked. I've also decided I'm just not going to movies with "Part One" in their title anymore. I'll wait till the whole series is finished and then watch it all together if it seems worthy of that. The more blockbuster movies try to be like prestige TV, the more I want to skip them or watch them at home on TV. Still, the positive buzz and multiple Oscar nominations made me curious, so I ended up watching the show, expecting to dislike its two leads but discovering all the great things about this fantastic musical people had fallen so hard for.

What I found was the exact opposite of what I expected. At least as mounted in this movie, Wicked is an atrocious story with unimpressive songs, but the two stars are very captivating. Erivo and Grande breathe life into their one-dimensional characters in ways that only talented, committed actors can. But their performances can't make such an unpleasant and insulting film palatable. Every other person or CGI entity in this labored "comedy," with its heaviest of heavy-handed themes, doesn't even play a one-dimensional role. The supporting parts are not even characters; everyone embodies a single idea, as if one-line extras have been elevated to featured roles. This is most exemplified by Glinda's catty univecity friends, played by Bowen Yang and Bronwyn James, who constantly appear throughout the school scenes to pull the same faces and say the same lines. Roles like these are not unexpected in a stage musical and can sometimes work in that context, but in a film, especially with the camera constantly tracking into the faces for emphasis, it's insufferable.

The same complete lack of depth applies to the more significant roles as well, like the school’s Dean of Sorcery, Madame Morrible (a misscasted Michelle Yeoh), its talking-goat history professor, Dr. Dillamond (voiced by Peter Dinklage) and the Wizard of Oz himself, (Jeff Goldblum taking on the role origenated by stage legend Joel Grey on Brodway). These are not characters; they're message delivery systems whose only function seems to convey the show's offensively simplistic themes. Those themes are arrived at by some of the most forced and illogical metaphors I've seen. Evil or misguided leaders are trying to control Oz by stirring up hate towards a disadvantaged, underrepresented community to unify the rest of the citizenry and "make Oz great again." But the victims of this fascist campaign are the talking animals, who seem fully integrated into everyone's lives. If they are meant to be a metaphor for Jews in pre-WWII Germany or immigrants in contemporary America, the work hasn't been done to draw the needed parallels. If the point is that bad guys decide whom they're going to demonize based entirely on ransom decisions, that is a lazy and almost willfully irresponsible misunderstanding of how totalitarian regimes work.

Even the foundational premise, that Elphaba has been ostracized by everyone, beginning with her father, because she was born with green skin, makes no sense in the context of the Land of Oz. This is a place where the majority of the population has an extreme and/or bizarre appearance. And why would green be rejected when the shining city at the center of the land, where the Wizard lives, is green? It would be like Donald Trump rejecting Ivanka if she was born gold. And if you live in a world where you're baby is delivered by a talking wolf and nursed by a giant bear, I don't think skin color means the same thing to you as it does to the racist folks of our world.

All these conceptual flaws seem like elements that would matter far less in a stage production. Yet, in their attempt to visualize the fantastic fantasy world of Oz, screenwriters Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox, who adapted Holzman's book of the show, and director Jon M. Chu (Step Up 2: Step Up 3D, Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights), double down on everything that doesn't work about this story. Chu is a choreographer who, even in his eighth feature film, hasn't figured out how to integrate musical sequences into a narrative movie. His choices are always to make each moment bigger and add more business for the characters, constantly cutting away from everything to show how much else is going on. Unfortunately, this drawn-out movie hasn't really created a world, just a bunch of bright colors. So every time Chu and editor Myron Kerstein cut away from their leads, they have nothing to show us except what they already shown us over and over again. The reaction shots of Yang and James are just the most egregious examples.

Besides breaking the show into two separate films, the biggest sin the filmmakers commit is the way the musical numbers are staged. Don't fans of a show like this come to the movie version to revel in the songs they love? Don't they want to see the singing actors, especially ones of Erivo and Grande's caliber, embody the production numbers they love? The disservice Chu and company do to Wicked's signature songs like "What Is this Feeling?," "Popular," and "Defying Gravity" is criminal. If I weren't already somewhat familiar with these songs, I'd never imagine they were anything special based on the stopy-starty way they're put across in this movie. Chu adds so much stage business and interruptions to "Popular" that it doesn't even feel like a complete song.

Act II's show-stopping closing song, "Defying Gravity," which ends this movie, is dressed up with so much action, explosions, and special effects that you'd think Cynthia Erivo was a non-singer and the director needed to distract from her inability to carry the number on her own. But that's nonsense. It's just an example of filmmakers lacking faith in the material they're adapting. The fact that this song is used as the conclusion of the movie, rather than the second act climax, results in the filmmakers trying to raise the narrative stakes to higher and higher degrees to wow the audience and leave us breathlessly excited for the sequel. But all they do is take away from the thing that makes this show most unique, it's all-timer show stopper. The misshandling of "Defying Gravity" is the culmination of a myriad of terrible choices made in this most unpleasant movie.