Post by Dracula on Nov 23, 2024 12:40:57 GMT -5
Wicked(11/20/2024)
Warning: Review contains some spoilers
Then I guess we need to get into the whole “Part One” of it all, which is definitely something that will affect this movie’s legacy and reception. I’ll say this, in terms of the movie that’s in front of us they handle the “to be continued” about as well as they could have. The movie ends on exactly the song you think it’s going to end on and it proves to be a fairly rousing conclusion that also serves as a logical turning point for the characters which makes sense as a breaking point. That said, I’m kind of inherently going to be cautious about praising a movie that doesn’t have a real ending and there are kind of a lot of reasons why I suspect the second part of this could prove to be kind of a wet noodle of an ending when it comes out next year. I haven’t seen the Broadway musical and don’t know how it ends but I have heard several people say it has a messy second act that doesn’t live up to the first and seeing this movie I kind of do see who they’ve written themselves into a corner. We know from the intro that the events of The Wizard of Oz are canon and as such we know that Elphaba’s revolution is doomed. There’s a dramatic way to do that and everything about this seems to be setting up Glinda to be the Robert Ford to Elphaba’s Jesse James but we also know that this isn’t what ends up happening; rather than reluctantly taking her friend out herself Glinda is going to outsource her “wet work” to a Kansan teenager who shows up randomly and that’s going to make for some awkward storytelling. But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here, what about the movie that’s right in front of me? Well, it’s an extremely mixed bag. It’s got some good music, some fun performances, a fairly silly story, a visual style with pros and cons, and a whole bunch of loose ends. Not something to be taken too seriously, but as fluffy entertainment from Hollywood goes you can do a lot worse.
*** out of Five
In this era of cinema illiteracy there is a very small list of “old” movies that you can still reasonably expect most people to have seen and one of the movies on it is the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. Given that level of brand recognition it’s become a pretty natural target for further monetization by studios who, pretty much since the beginning of the blockbuster era of cinema, have been trying to find some way to turn it into a larger franchise. The fact that it’s based on a series of books that are in the public domain have made it a particularly frequent target and the only reason we don’t see even more Wizard of Oz franchise detritus is that pretty much every attempt to sequel-ize this movie have failed miserably. 1978’s The Wiz? Some people have misplaced nostalgia for that one, but they shouldn’t. 1985’s Return to Oz? A flop mostly known for fueling the nightmares of 80s kids. 2013’s Oz the Great and Powerful? Nice try by Sam Raimi, but the final product still felt soulless and forgettable. The IP has also produced all sorts of misguided TV shows, video games, toys… you name it and it’s failed to recapture the magic of The Wizard of Oz. But there is one exception. In 2003 Stephen Schwartz, a composter mostly known for his work in the 70s on the musicals “Pippen” and “Godspell,” made a huge comeback with “Wicked,” an adaptation of a novel called “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” by Gregory Maguire which re-imagined the Wizard of Oz story and the events that proceeded it from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West. That musical was a huge success and is still running on Broadway over twenty years later and has now become the basis for a major motion picture which looks to finally break the Oz sequel curse.
Wicked begins with the ending: we see Glinda “Good Witch of the North” Upland (Ariana Grande) arriving in Munchkinland to announce that Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo) AKA the Wicked Witch of the West has been killed prompting one of the munchkins to ask Upland about the past she shared with Thropp. From there we flash back to the beginning of Thropp’s life where we learn that Thropp was born with her signature green skin hue and was almost immediately rejected by her intolerant father, who favored her younger sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who was disabled and wheelchair-bound but has a “natural” skintone. When accompanying Nessarose on her first day at the prestigious Shiz Academy Elphaba is spotted by Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) the university’s Dean of Sorcery, who recognizes that Elphaba has some sort of magical powers she doesn’t really know how to control and opts to enroll her in the school and make her a protégé. To accommodate this Elphaba is asked to room with fellow freshman Glinda and the two make for quite the odd couple as Glinda is this really girly popular “queen bee” among the students and fits every stereotype of the spoiled blonde brat while Elphaba is this studious woman whose personality has been forged by constant abuse, trauma, and discrimination. This tension along with several other plot strands eventually come together around the hot topic in Oz during this period, mainly the discrimination that is apparently omnipresent against the world’s talking animals, a discrimination that grows increasingly threatening by the day making Elphaba increasingly radicalized around the issue.
Following the success of “Glee” and The Greatest Showman it seems like Hollywood decided that the future was theater kids and they greenlit a whole bunch of musicals which have trickled out in the last few years and for the most part this has not worked out well for them. Cats, West Side Story, Dear Evan Hanson, The Color Purple… it’s been one underperformer after another and it’s gotten to the point where studios are actively trying to hide the fact that their movies are musicals when they cut trailers for them. If pre-release hype is to be believed then it looks like Wicked is going to be the movie that bucks this trend and I think that’s in part because the film seems less enamored with the traditions of Hollywood musicals and instead speaks in the language of the modern blockbusters. It’s set in a big gaudy world with CGI creatures, it mines existing IP for which it acts as a reboot, does kind of cringey “prequel” stuff (did you want to know why it was decided to pain the bricks yellow? Me neither), and it’s also split itself into two halves despite itself being very long. Though it doesn’t say it on the poster, the film’s title card announces upfront that this thing is actually called “Wicked: Part 1” and as such it’s not too much of a shock when the film ends with the words “to be continued.” This is not, however, really an action movie, which probably does differentiate it a bit from the summer blockbusters it’s taking notes from and maybe more closely resembles a Disney movie brought into live action.
At the center of the film is, I guess, the frenemy relationship between Glinda and Elphaba, which is initially rooted in a lot of animosity as Glinda is jealous Elphaba for being the favored student of Morrible and Elphaba is annoyed that Glinda is a selfish and spoiled brat. Ariana Grande gives a really energetic performance bringing this version of Glinda to the screen as a sort of cross between Tracy Flick, Regina George, and Barbie before she started thinking about death. The movie milks this for all it’s worth and gets a lot of comedy out of it but perhaps at the expense of giving her more of an arc. She goes from being passive aggressively dismissive of Elphaba to being an ally seemingly in an instant during a rather strange school dance scene and Elphaba seems to accept her as a friend pretty damn quickly despite her very problematic tendencies. Really for a movie being sold as a story of female friendship these two really aren’t friends for long here and while the film certainly sets Glinda up to be exactly the type of person who would capitulate to fascism the movie never quite twists the knife on the ultimate betrayal here, positing it as something of an accident of timing more than a deeply held character flaw.
Speaking of fascism, did I mention that upon meeting him the movie reveals the Wizard of Oz himself as having actually been a fascist leader sowing hate and division throughout Oz? I guess that’s a spoiler but, it’s kind of predictable. Early on in the film it seemed a bit odd that the people of Oz were so shocked and weirded out by the sight of a woman with green skin given that they live in a world where it’s considered somewhat normal for a talking bear to work as a midwife, but soon it becomes clear that Oz actually isn’t too thrilled with those talking animals either and its established that we’re going to get a fairly straightforward allegory for racism and discrimination as the Oz-ians start to turn on talking animals including a goat professor voiced by Peter Dinklage and that this will be the issue that ultimately leads Elphaba to rebel against the Wizard after a (rather poorly planned) attempt to recruit her. It would probably be an understatement to say that this allegory is pretty shallow and unsophisticated… it’s Avatar levels of obvious. But it’s also in a movie that’s based on a children’s story and it’s also unfortunately well timed. Given certain events that occurred earlier this month this story about rebelling against an emerging fascism rooted in finding a hated enemy to unite people against is something that probably hits a bit harder at the moment even in its most simplistic form.
Of course this is a musical we’re talking about here and the quality of the music matters quite a bit and for the most part I’d say it mostly holds up. That’s probably not going to come as much of a surprise given that this thing has been wildly successful as a stage musical for as long as it has been, and hearing some of the tunes here… yeah, it makes sense that it’s popular. Notably Grande and Erivo both seem to have the pipes and the personalities to pull off most of these tunes. I could quibble about Grande going a little too far in her show-offy vocal runs and moments where the mixing obscures some of the lyrics, but for the most part this will probably satisfy the people who are just there for the music. For people looking for spectacle more generally? Well, it’s okay. The film certainly has big elaborate colorful sets and occasionally induges in some gonzo craziness like the sight of a talking animal nightclub band that is certainly eye catching. Jon Chu also stages some of the musical sequences pretty interestingly like a performance set in this crazy circular library, but I would stay it’s a definite step down from what he accomplished with the wildly under-appreciated In the Heights. Compared to that movie I’d say this is a step down on every level, but that was probably a project I was inherently going to be more drawn to for a lot of reasons so it’s probably not the fairest of comparisons.
*** out of Five
