‘Wicked’ is ghastly, despite its great performances

Make no mistake: Wicked features sparks of brilliance, between its dazzling lead performances, and some of the filmmaking flourishes Chu attempts to bring to his second big-screen musical. However, anything resembling inspiration appears to have been snuffed out in the crib. Take, for instance, the costume design for the preppy, ditzy, wannabe "it girl" Galinda Upland (Ariana Grande), who goes on to become Oz's Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. Her pretty shades of pink ought to stand out, the same way her magic boarding classmate Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo)—the future Wicked Witch of the West—ought to stick out sorely given her bright green skin. But despite pink and green being largely reserved for these two characters, the eye is rarely drawn to them in a crowd, given how drab every single shade appears.

These are just two examples, but they're emblematic of the larger aesthetic problems with the Wizard of Oz pseudo-prequel, which has enjoyed life on Broadway since 2003. Based on Gregory Maguire’s book of the same name, the show is a revisionist alternate history of the Wicked Witch—the cackling villainess made famous by Margaret Hamilton in '39—and has since taken on a life of its own. Re-imagined as the story of a young outcast named Elphaba (named for L. Frank Baum, the author of the children's books on which Fleming's classic was based), the stage show is best known for building to a pre-intermission climax in the form of showstopping belter "Defying Gravity," which sees the character come into her own in complex ways. From that point on, it re-tells the familiar story of Oz from an alternate point of view, and if you think the show's iconic number is the logical dividing line for a two-part movie, you'd be technically correct. Then again, that's like releasing a Julius Caesar film that ends with Caesar's assassination. While the break feels right for a stage show where the follow-up arrives in mere minutes, selling this half-story for the price of a full ticket, when the follow-up won't arrive for another year at least, leaves things feeling thematically and narratively incomplete (though in dropping the "Part 1" for the marketing, unsuspecting audiences are left none the wiser).

Still, any film deserves to be approached on its own terms, even if it does keep pulling in visual references to MGM’s The Wizard of Oz, a classic of the silver screen. After an opening framing device set in the aftermath of the classic events of Oz, i.e. the Wicked Witch's demise, Grande's Galinda makes an immediately impactful appearance before a crowd of Munchkins (a group still referred to as short, but without employing any actual dwarf actors…Yay, equality?) From her very first frames, Grande nails the part of Galinda: she exudes a tongue-in-cheek, Disneyland version of goodness and grace, with nearly animatronic smiles and waving gestures meant to comfort kids from afar. But the closer the camera gets to her, the more she reveals withheld insecurity behind her expressive eyes.

The rest of the film unfolds as a flashback about Galinda's untold friendship with Elphaba—the "whole story," as Galinda calls it, even though it's only half a movie. Wicked's visual strengths and weaknesses also become clear within minutes, and are illustrated in the differences between enormous group scenes and more intimate exchanges. Anytime the film breaks out into coordinated musical numbers (which is to say: frequently), there's a sense that there may have been energy and rhythm on set, but each of these scenes is cut with little attention to space, to detail, and to the impact of movement and sound.

The film's production design is rich, but any splendor or attention to color seems to have been muted in post-production, leaving the lavish land of Oz looking like a Mad Max post-apocalypse, but without the vehicular fun. It’s depressing to look at. Granted, its otherworldly backdrops are only meant to be window dressing. They’re hardly supposed to imbue the film with a sense of realism—à la Chu's previous Broadways adaption, the politically flavored, Manhattan-set In the Heights—but they rarely have the feeling of a lived reality, either. Galinda and Elphaba are residents of this kingdom, the popular girl and the social reject respectively, broad high school types whose lives are defined by their relationships to their environment. When their worlds become noncommittal, so too does their story.

Despite this, Grande and Erivo work wonders with the material, balancing stage-like presence with cinematic subtlety. Their body language and broad gestures keep in mind the stage production as they project for the back row, but the nuance they bring to the characters in close-up is a wonderful counter-balance, making them immediately intriguing. This is part of why the film's one-on-one musical numbers usually work. The camera, in these moments, never fails to match their energy, even though it does seem to leave a little on the table in terms of passion. In the story of Wicked, Galinda and Elphaba go from bitter rivals to best friends, a pairing that launched a thousand ships of lesbian fantasy, but the film's approach to the stage show's queer subtext is awkward at best. Once again, there appears to have been some kind of intent in the lighting and production design. In a rare moment when the film feels visually inspired, it glows bright pink as Galinda sings about Elphaba in a hallway lined with distinctly yonic windows; it's hardly subtle. However, little by way of camera, editing or performance speaks to any kind of physical proximity between the two. Their dynamic is touching and friendly, but rarely electric.

In the process, the stakes of Wicked tend to feel vague at best. Other minor characters populate each scene, including romantic interests, and a sorcery professor (Michelle Yeoh) who's more plot function than person, and all the while, a subplot about growing fascism against the kingdom's talking animals is referenced, but rarely explored, despite the movie's two-hour 40-minute runtime (yes, this half-film is somehow longer than the entire show, and has the dead air to prove it). All of these ideas supposedly come to a head in a moment when Elphaba is presented with a vital choice and the temptation to power. But much of the context of this choice feels incidental to her very existence. It's hard to see the movie's final act—and its arrival at "Defying Gravity"—as anything but obligatory, since the story's real fallout is yet to come.

Despite its handful of moving moments—the occasional kind gesture between its leads, and only the vocal crescendos of some of its songs—Wicked is defiantly dull, and excruciatingly long. Chu's usual eye for emotional and physical detail amidst movement is subsumed at every turn by a production seemingly hell bent on turning some of the most fun and imaginative hallmarks of stage and screen into visual sludge. It's not quite an industry death-knell, but any seasoned or even casual fan of classic Hollywood musicals ought to recoil at how joyless this one turned out to be.