Wicked: Part I
*½/****
starring Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande-Butera, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum
screenplay by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox, based on the musical by Holzman and the novel by Gregory Maguire
directed by Jon M. Chu
by Walter Chaw It’s fairly obvious to me why the Broadway musical turned Hollywood blockbuster Wicked is a tween sensation, and though the curmudgeon in me wants to scoff, I don’t begrudge its success. It’s gently anti-fascist; its broad metaphors for race and sexual orientation are righteously inclusive; its peculiarly catchy songbook full of otherwise unexceptional belters takes no unnecessary risks that might alienate or offend; and its mean-girl/makeover anchors are reliable bedrock for its ice cream-and-taffeta target audience. Lamprey-ed onto a beloved intellectual property (the 1939 film, not the books, which are still waiting for adaptations perverse enough for L. Frank Baum–Return to Oz notwithstanding), Wicked is a laboratory creation machine-tooled to tweak the unearned tingle like a twigged-out harpist flailing against hormonal strings. Misunderstood heroine? Handsome prince of unusual depth? Popular girl with hidden complexity? As a guy who grew up with and is still a sucker for Allan Moyle’s Pump Up the Volume (which, with an infinitely superior songbook, follows essentially the same narrative trajectories), who am I to harsh a nation’s mellow? I won’t even ask why they keep painting Black women green in multi-million-dollar franchises. Margaret Hamilton, The Wizard of Oz, okay, “uncle,” you win. Why aren’t the Munchkins little people anymore? Kidding. Not kidding, but kidding.
Listen, I’m not actually looking for answers. I know the answers and I really, truly don’t care anymore. I know why Wicked looks like an AI-generated advertisement for that Scottish Willy Wonka experience. I know why everything is cranked up past vocal cord-/eardrum-shattering, why so much time is invested in giving origin stories to the Yellow Brick Road and flying monkeys. I don’t know how the talking-dog OB-GYN can tell that baby Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo as an adult) is green, and I don’t know why a talking bear is an au pair except that “au pair bear” is a no-brainer in the dad-joke Necronomicon, but it doesn’t matter. Oh, and I don’t know why, if Elphaba melts when exposed to water, she doesn’t appear to be concerned about rain or, you know, water, and how did she survive this long, anyway? I am calling this the “Shyamalan Conundrum” going forward, even though that term could be used for any number of things. Everyone hates and is repulsed by Elphaba for being green, yet one of the charms of Oz, I thought, was how unfazed most of its residents were by, like, Tin Men and animate scarecrows and shit. Maybe Wicked studied bigotry from the Barbie school of selective social metaphors, or maybe it’s because Elphaba is Carrie, an emotional timebomb of telekinetic devastation who stalks the world dressed like a turn-of-the-century Oklahoma schoolmarm and harbours the dark secret that she is Kali, destroyer of worlds. Here’s your Girl Power empowerment myth, motherfuckers. Bow down. Is it now a problem that Elphaba has been cast as an African-American woman? No? Not for me, either.
Elphaba goes to school at Shizz University, where everyone is pushing 30 and unaware that “shizz” means “shit”…or ARE they? “Shizz” may be a riff on “Oz,” but Oz itself is a reference to “ounce,” because Baum’s books were about transitioning the economy to the silver standard. Just relax, Grandad! You’re right. I hear you. I did like a brief look at a pair of silver slippers gifted to privileged “Heather” Galinda (Ariana Grande), because silver was the colour of Dorothy’s slippers in the first book, transmogrified to ruby in the MGM film to better exploit the Technicolor format. Galinda is a vision in pink, a vile opportunist and spoiled rich girl described at one point with vitriolic derision as “blonde.” Judge Elphaba for her skin? Well, she’s gonna judge you for your hair. It’s like that Shrek thing where you can be and look however you want, and no one should bully you–unless you’re a short man. If you’re a short man, you should eat a dick and die, says Shrek. Ariana Grande is extraordinarily good as Galinda. She’s hilarious. She’s like the origin story of Madeline Kahn’s Elizabeth in Young Frankenstein, vibrating at the same ridiculous frequencies and nailing the moments where her pearlescent shell begins to crack and she has to come to terms with how hateful and toxic is her performative niceness. She and Elphaba are the duelling straw men of our current cultural cataclysm: the have-too-muches vs. the have-nothings, with a lot of ugly, colour-washed Kansan flyover in between. I like how the film opens with the burning of a Wicker Man effigy of Elphaba in the middle of that town spiral where Dorothy began her journey in ’39. Something…I don’t know, darkly poetic about the idea of a ritualistic celebration of murdering witches in a patently artificial, militarily-enforced utopia.
See? Wicked is current. It has “something to say” and is the “film we need” at this flex point in history. I don’t argue any of that. And if an artifact must be this popular, at least let it be outraged, as Wicked is, at the silencing of college professors, the cultural takeover by a supremacist faction that uses fear as the only defense for its policies of Balkanization and xenophobia, and the demonizing of Black women for all the ills of a world generally run by WASPs and evangelicals. The picture is also, alas, a pox on the eyes and the ears, a product of this epoch in film that will be remembered as a time when studios, forgetting the lessons of Cleopatra and Dr. Doolittle, reacted to new technologies by extruding this unnatural hybrid of Cleopatra and Dr. Doolittle. It will make a tribillion dollars (an amount large enough that no one will understand why it’s made this much money–except all the people who don’t understand how it didn’t make more), and for a while movie theatres will heroically extubate themselves with a wet schlork and declare heroically in their hospital gowns that they’re ready for their close-up again–right up until the inevitable relapse when someone decides to push their luck and finish the long-awaited Cats trilogy. Why not? If 2024 proved anything, it’s that no shizz sandwich is too rank for America to eat the hell out of. Mmmmmmm. Oh yeah, Wicked is 160 minutes long and only the first half of the play, meaning that song I had to listen to at my son’s high-school graduation, warbled through a curtain of tears by two small girls who felt every note, isn’t even in it. I have to be honest with you, I probably won’t see the sequel. If I do, it will just be to watch Ariana Grande for another three hours, giving the best goddamn senior-musical-production performance I’ve ever seen in my fucking life, I swear to God. I had my doubts about her for some reason, but those are gone for good. For good. See what I did there? I’m not proud.
