Wicked (2024)

Wicked is a movie that, for all of its color and grandeur and production design and costumes galore, I never could get my feet into.  It’s a prequel by and large to The Wizard of Oz, based on a book by Gregory Maguire that I never read and heavily adapted from a Broadway musical that I never saw.  So, this is my introduction and, frankly, I don’t get it.  Or, putting it in a better context, it’s a movie whose purpose is confusing, whose themes are painted on way too thick and whose tone is all over the place.  And at 2 hours and 45 minutes, that’s a very long sit.

I sat through all of those 2 hours and 45 minutes without ever once feeling as if I was in the room.  At all times, I was aware that I was watching a movie – always aware that I was watching it from the fourteenth row.  I was aware that the world of Oz here was made up of production design, of sets and furniture.  I was aware of actors on a screen.  I never got a sense of embellishment.  The world of Oz never came to life.  This is a just a movie.  I never fell under its spell.

Consider its magical source.  I saw the 4K presentation of The Wizard of Oz over the summer and it was breathtaking.  I love the look of that film, with this stagey plastic plants and painted backgrounds, I always imagined that I was basically looking at a fun 3D pop-up book.  This movie, I dunno.  The work is done but I don’t feel the world.

The story batters between two apparent inspirations.  One is the Disney misfire Maleficent, in that it tries to repose a classic shitheel villain by exploring her backstory to show that she’s not so bad after all (I also felt a little taste of Anakin Skywalker on the back end).  The other is Harry Potter, as we have young person – in this case a green-skinned young student named Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo) who is accompanying her paraplegic sister Nessarose (Marisa Bode) to the Shiz University, a magic school not a million miles removed from Hogwarts.  Elphaba is an outcast due to her appearance (the racial implications are, again, waaaay too thick) and, to make matters worse, her rival in just about everything is an annoying preppy named Ga-Linda (Ariana Grande) who will some day send Dorothy’s heels a-clickin’ But for now, she’s kind of terrible, a dimwitted pretty girl, a delicate flower whose status floats above all she surveys based on the fact that she’s pretty, rich and privileged.  I carp but she does have some choice moments, as when she nearly has a fainting spell when she, for the first time in her life, doesn’t get her way.  Okay, I’ll admit, her empty-eyed daffiness is amusing – it points in the direction of the comedy that I wish that movie had more of.

I know that the idea of having the future Wicked Witch be a good person and the future good witch of the north be an over-bearing snob is just a way to have then switch places later, but I never really got involved with either.  The felt like types, not people.  Their songs, by Stephen Schwartz, are unmemorable.  Most every one is a power ballad and, for me, they all sound the same.

But the biggest misstep, for me, is that I am unsure what world I’m in.  Wicked is apparently a prequel to The Wizard of Oz but what?  The book?  The movie?  Is this a reboot?  A reimagining?  Dorothy and her friends can briefly be see at the film’s opening but, is this suppose to take place in the same world as the movie?  I don’t know.  Questions like that are suppose to be irrelevant, but I feel like I need some sort of orientation.  Or at least, some sense of consistency.  The screenplay by Winnie Holzman (who wrote the musical) and Dana Fox (author of romantic comedies of no great distinction) never find an ironclad tone here.  The story moves between melodrama and daffy comedy and back to melodrama with a bizarre whiplash speed.  We got a drip of comedy and then a waterfall of the maudlin stuff.

I guess there will be fans of the book and the musical who will walk away from this movie with a much more fulfilling experience than I had.  I just always felt like I was watching a movie that didn’t move me.