A year and a few hundred million dollars later, John M. Chu’s adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked, itself an adaptation of the Gregory Maguire novel of the same name, which in turn was a revisionist reinterpretation of characters from The Wizard of Oz (both L. Frank Baum’s children’s fable and the 1939 movie), has come to its curtain call. Somehow, it’s even more culturally omnipresent than it was last time around — brand collabs, tie-in merchandise, (apparently decent-tasting) Skittles — but I have a hard time believing that Wicked: For Good will capture the hearts and minds of its intended audience in the same way its predecessor did, even with all the eye-catching bells and whistles reminding them to head to the theater. It retains all of the problems of the first one — aside from my overall issues with the work’s ethos, Chu still insists on directing it as if he were making a Marvel musical — while adding new ones, with the most prominent being its terminal case of prequel-itis* and the fact that, well, the second act was always kind of a letdown.
Wicked: Part One benefited from this division, as it tells a complete story and ends on the sole unambiguous showstopper penned by Schwartz and Holzman. The superhero-like aesthetic made a certain amount of sense there, given that it depicted the origins of our anti-hero, the witch Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), as if she were waiting for her cue to go on stage for Eternals 2. She has an arc, going from a discriminated-against young woman attending her first year at school to a powerful magic-wielder with a vendetta against the charlatan “Wizard” Oz (Jeff Goldblum), who just so happens to be her dad. She struggles, finds love, makes a best friend in Glinda (Ariana Grande), a fellow witch who can’t actually use magic but is universally well-liked, and finds a purpose in her opposition to Oz’s rule, which has a particular issue with talking animals for some reason. At 150 minutes, one could already see the metaphorical buttons popping off of the narrative’s shirt, but any complaints from the crowd went out the window once the high notes of “Defying Gravity” shattered movie-poster displays in the lobby. It ends well, with Elphaba mounting the Batpod after falling alongside the now-dead Harvey Dent, speeding off down the highways under police pursuit into an unknown future. Or something like that.
Oddly enough, the sequel gives one plenty of room to keep making superhero jokes, and essentially ends in a similar fashion to the first, though the fact that its third act unfolds simultaneously with The Wizard of Oz ensures that the primary conflict is resolved. It starts with Elphaba conducting a daytime raid on a construction site, where enslaved animals are forced to complete construction on the Yellow Brick Road. Chu’s language is that of Snyder’s Man of Steel, with particular emphasis placed on a shot taken from a close POV to one of the convoy’s guards — Elphaba, floating in the air, dress flowing like a cape, seeming alien and powerful to those below her. It’s a bizarre choice, but it’s one that Chu keeps going back to, including several scenes in which he directly echoes the “disappearing Batman act” on the rooftops and terraces of the Emerald City, and a finale in which some enterprising creator could make a YouTube hit dubbing Erivo’s dialogue in Bale’s husky growl. It makes sense — she’s a black-clad vigilante who isn’t exactly buddy-buddy with the regime — but it’s just odd that he chose that language over, say, epic fantasy or, god forbid, the cinematic musical. Worse, it’s a choice that amplifies the already-dour tone of this second act.
I don’t mean “melancholic,” a word that could accurately describe the feelings of longing and dissatisfaction, which eventually give way to a deep homesickness, at the core of Fleming’s Wizard of Oz. In Chu’s hands, this fairy tale stuff is serious business, which robs the fantastical elements of their whimsy. The chief exception to this is Goldblum’s number, “Wonderful,” which allows him to continue the vaudevillian stylings he so delightfully displayed in the first film’s final section — his humor is on-point, his choreography full of silly little magic tricks and gadgets, and he has a solid rapport with Grande and Erivo, both of whom are incredibly talented performers chafing against the rigidity of their roles and Chu’s direction. It’s telling that the director’s constantly-in-motion camera pauses when it’s focused on Grande, taking time to frame her in a way that suggests that a) he knows he’s working with someone special and b) her contract was tight enough to ensure he’d have to put her in a good light. It’s her scenes that have a relative amount of intimacy to them — a feel he couldn’t give to “As Long as You’re Mine,” a number in which Erivo and co-star Jonathan Bailey, playing the soon-to-be Scarecrow Figaro, are about to be intimate with one another. She (and we) can’t savor this moment, especially since this is the last time he’ll have skin that isn’t made of burlap.
Wicked has always dovetailed too cleanly into The Wizard of Oz, with its supporting cast transmogrified into Dorothy’s companions or opponents over the first half of this film. Elphaba’s sister (Marissa Bode), now the totalitarian governor of Munchkinland, pronounces herself “The Wicked Witch of the East” after a failed magical attempt to make her subordinate, Boq (SpongeBob), fall in love with her. After she flees in a panic, it’s up to our other witch to heal his… broken heart. She does this by making him into — you guessed it — the Tin Man. I could go on and on providing examples of this, but the point is that its symmetry isn’t exactly clever. It makes a fantastical world like Oz into something strangely smaller than Sesame Street. Surely a Tin Man or a Scarecrow or a cowardly Lion (apparently voiced by Colman Domingo, though I can’t recall a line of his dialogue) could be of importance without Elphaba’s direct intervention? Again, this is more of an issue with its source than anything in Chu’s adaptation, so I’ll get back to properly placing the blame: any time he gets close to a direct visual echo of Fleming in his visions of these characters, got-damn is it’s funny how poorly done it is
More precisely, it would be scary if it weren’t so ridiculous — for instance, the Tin Man here is the stuff of nightmares. He’s a hybrid CGI/practical VFX monster who is unintentionally laugh-out-loud funny when he makes his dramatic first appearance, revealed to the world in a more dramatic fashion than del Toro did with the Creature in his Frankenstein. SpongeBob may have experience in the make-up chair, but my god, is his face poorly-suited for this particular shade of silver, bells, and whistles and all. It only grows in ridiculousness from there — he gets steamy heartburn when he’s riled up, such as when he’s trying to lead the residents of the Emerald City on a would-be hunt to annihilate the Witch***.
The Scarecrow isn’t much better, as he’s an entirely CGI creation that, despite all of the advancements in facial mo-cap, still might have been more appealing if they’d just used make-up. The animals are strange and stilted digital creatures, the backgrounds standard green-screen digital landscapes, the Flying Monkeys an unsettling compromise between Caesar from the modern Planet of the Apes films and the General from Tim Burton’s vision of the same source. If the choice was between aping iconography outright or embracing the edge of its revisionist ancestor (Return to Oz), he chose to make it functionally lifeless. If Oz is the kind of place where one could theoretically break into song at any moment and not have it seem out of place, a technicolor wonderland liberated from the dull brown of Dust Bowl Kansas, it should disappoint us that our fantasies have come to reflect the drabness of home.
This is what poorly rendered revisionist works do. Unless they supply their own iconography and further complicate the myth by deconstructing it (see: Leone, Sergio or Corbucci, Sergio), they come up short compared to their inspiration. I get that a comparison to the Italian masters who perfected the neo-Western is perhaps an unfair one, given that they were working with the language and iconography of an entire genre, but the point stands. One has to do something transformative with the story in order for it to sustain itself as a living, breathing work on its own merits. As a stage-bound spectacle, Wicked had the benefit of being live entertainment, with a solid modern score, ascendant performers hitting the high notes, master craftsmen building the sets and designing the costumes, and – this is important – a three-hour runtime. Audiences responded to it for a number of reasons, but it would be dishonest to state that the appeal didn’t come from the fact that you had the land of Oz, Emerald City and Yellow Brick Road and all, embodied physically; a unique aspect neither Baum nor Maguire’s books nor Fleming’s film possessed. Moving the musical to the screen gave up its home-field advantage – is it any surprise that it couldn’t take home a championship?
Weirdly, splitting the story up might have given the Wicked films a more lasting effect than a straight single-film adaptation would have. This is entirely because you can feel free to totally ignore the second installment and just watch the first one instead, should you ever feel the need to revisit this story, much like how some nerds claim you should skip Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones when rewatching the Star Wars films. I stand by a claim I made last year to a reader who asked whether that review was positive: Wicked: Part One is a good adaptation of a musical I don’t particularly like****.
On the other hand, For Good is the worst of both worlds, with the flaws inherent in its source amplified by the drabness and dourness of Chu’s capitulation to modern blockbuster stylings. Try as I might after the first thirty minutes, clicking my heels together didn’t bring me home any faster, no matter how much I wanted to leave the theater.
* One could call it “Lucas Syndrome,” in which all things have to be explained and come together in the most roundabout way.
** I had a lot of fun imagining Ariana Grande sitting down for a nice shot of Munchkin Fernet-Branca, only to see a made-up Cynthia Erivo and the Scarecrow flash her a brief smile.
*** This segment is made more absurd in its final moments — the final shot of this scene sees the traditional foursome move off onto the Yellow Brick Road as the city-dwellers stand at the gate, waiting with their propaganda placards, hastily-assembled torches, and pitchforks, all dressed up with nowhere to go.
**** As to why I didn’t cover the faux-reactionary politics of this film, I’ll point you to that review, in which I said everything I think I needed to there, given that it applies to both installments.