I've read the Gregory Maguire novel "Wicked" and I saw the stage adaptation about a decade ago. I liked them both fine, but I wouldn't consider myself a "Wicked" fan. This version of Oz never held as much appeal to me as the one in L. Frank Baum books. However, I've always appreciated "Wicked" as the piece of media that arguably kicked off the trend of retelling familiar childhood stories from the misunderstood villain's point of view. A film version of the very popular musical was inevitable, and was wisely left in the hands of creators with an affinity for musicals - director Jon M. Chu, producers Marc Platt and David Stone, and co-writer Winnie Holzman, who adapted the book to the stage version.
After many years, the long-awaited screen version of "Wicked" has been split into two parts. Because the musical had very little breathing room between the song numbers, the story has been expanded to allow for more interesting interactions among the major characters. We have the outcast Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo as an adult, Karis Musongole as a child), who was born with green skin and uncontrollable magic powers, who meets the entitled queen bee Galinda (Ariana Grande-Butera) at Oz's Shiz University, and they become unlikely friends. This relationship is the crux of the stage musical, and whatever you want to say about the rest of the movie, they got this part right. Erivo and Grande-Butera deliver very strong performances and have real chemistry together, so it's very easy to sympathize with them and get caught up in their lives
The casting does a lot of the work here. Elphaba being played by Cynthia Erivo, an African-American actress, and being styled to emphasize this, immediately connects her to racial minority narratives and adds extra dimensions to her outsider status and her hero worship of the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum). Then you have Ariana Grande-Butera, former Nickelodeon child star turned pop idol, playing the worst kind of pampered, privileged elitist. She's simultaneously extremely hateable, but so funny and so stubborn about asserting her own warped worldview that it's hard to resist her charms. Putting Erivo and Grande-Butera together in the same frames, and letting them clash and connect and find common ground is wonderfully satisfying to watch.
Where I feel that "Wicked" falls a bit short is with being a musical spectacular. The sets and costuming are gorgeous, of course, and I have no complaints about the singing or the musical arrangements - often the Achilles heel with similar stage adaptations. However, there's such a heavy-handedness with the familiar "Wizard of Oz" imagery and far too much time is spent setting up all the side characters and subplots that won't pay off until the next movie. Galinda and Elphaba have a shared love interest, Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), and eventually Elphaba's younger sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) and the object of her affections, Boq (Ethan Slater) are all going to get swept up in the drama, but for this film these characters are just getting introduced and hanging around in a holding pattern. Part One of "Wicked" ends with the famous showstopper "Gravity," and sends the audience home on a triumphant high, but it does not work as a standalone film.
Jon M. Chu clearly put in a lot of effort here, but I have trouble with some of his cinematography and editing choices. Several of the musical numbers are far too busy, and there's a sequence involving an effigy burning that's just awkward to look at from every angle - the actors all seem to have been haphazardly composited together in the frame. Fortunately there's actually not as much reliance on CGI as I was expecting, with most of the dance and crowd scenes filled out nicely with real performers. The effects-heavy characters like goat professor Dr. Dillamond (Peter Dinklage) come off very well, and you can tell that a good deal of the singing was done live.
It's hard to evaluate "Wicked" when it's only a Part I, but it's better than I expected while still having a considerable amount of room for improvement. It gets the fundamental parts right, creating screen versions of Elphaba and Galinda who build on the versions from the musical. Some of the problems I had with the musical and novel versions have been replicated here - mashing a beloved children's movie and an edgy Fascist parable together means inevitable tonal clashes - but "Wicked" onscreen is very much its own beast. I don't know if I'll revisit it any time soon, but I will definitely show up for the second half in a few months.
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