Wicked is a lot. It’s a bit bloated, and it’s also sometimes beautiful. It is an intimate story about a powerful friendship that arrives on a smothering wave of marketing that simply will not let up (perhaps a Wicked bubble bath to relax from it all? Pink or green bubbles?). It is a massive cultural artifact and a movie that seems, mostly, just pretty nice. It’s a juggernaut of technically well-made goodness that has at its heart one outstanding performance: Cynthia Erivo, who plays Elphaba as if she has studied everything related to her character, up to and including Gregory Maguire’s much darker novel on which the musical is based, and incorporated all of that awareness into a performance that constantly suggests that she knows so much more than she has space to let on.
If you love this not-so-wicked witch, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s also a gift.
Wicked’s family tree is about as long as the yellow brick road: The movie is an adaptation of the musical by writer Winnie Holzman and composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz, which opened on Broadway in 2003. The musical was itself an adaptation—one with great liberties taken—of Maguire’s 1995 novel. That book gave the Wicked Witch a name, Elphaba Thropp, and a backstory. The musical elevated Glinda to co-lead, took out much of the darkness of Maguire’s novel, and dramatically changed the fates of many of the characters.
Maguire’s book, of course, took its inspiration from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and sequels, and the indelible 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, and probably most or any other Oz-sociations along the way. (Perhaps not The Wiz, though that musical-turned-movie is clearly also an ancestor of this one.) There was a point in time when The Wizard of Oz seemed like the one movie every American had seen; it was shown annually on network television, a magical tradition in which countless households went over the rainbow together and countless kids shrieked or marveled at Margaret Hamilton’s vividly green Wicked Witch.
I was one of those kids. But I was an Oz reader first and foremost, tearing through all 14 of Baum’s novels. And after an initial bout of skepticism, I became a reader of Maguire’s Wicked and all the books that came after. I can tell you that Elphaba’s story backwards and forwards; I can tell you that while Maguire reportedly set out to write about the nature of evil, he also wrote an incredible book about grief and regret that managed, at times, to be incredibly funny.
It is impossible to divorce Wicked from its source materials. It is also impossible to divorce it from what arose in its wake: Maleficent. Cruella. Wicked walked so that Frozen could run through the snow. The early 2000s were ripe for a story like this—one that tucks a pretty grim message about authoritarianism and judgment into a shiny green package and rewrites the life and times of someone perceived as a villain.
Elphaba, though, was never actually a villain, but the victim of a propaganda campaign by a truth-challenged ruler who would like all of Oz under his unmagical thumb. The forces of Hollywood and time that brought this movie to theaters at this particular moment could not have known quite what they were in for, politically speaking.
But almost all of that comes in the musical’s second act, and the second film, which will come along next year. The first act is the fun part, with the fun songs, but it lists a bit without that counterweight. Some new excess backstory is packed into the opening before the action moves to Shiz University, where Elphaba and her father are accompanying her sister Nessarose as she arrives for her first year (Nessarose is played by Marissa Bode, who is the first actor who uses a wheelchair to play the role). For truly mysterious reasons, the narrative is tweaked so that only Nessarose is set to attend; when Elphaba comes to her sister’s defense and inadvertently does some big, messy magic, sorcery teacher Madame Morrible (a regal Michelle Yeoh) takes Elphaba for a protege.
She also assigns Elphaba to share the perfect pink private suite of Galinda (Ariana Grande), and thus a great friendship begins: with rivalry and the pure biting fun of “What Is This Feeling?”, a love song in the form of a hate song. And then it’s movie college: A few classes, the arrival of a hot new student, complicated social (and dance) moves at the school dance forbidden club. And some upsetting news about the state of Oz’s sentient animals courtesy of Doctor Dillamond, a professor who is also a goat (and who is voiced by a grave Peter Dinklage).
The animals are perfect, every one of them, from Dillamond to the hapless lion cub that Fiyero and Elphaba rescue from a terrible classroom display. Their subplot slowly rises to the surface: The animals are being subjugated, limited, and they are losing the power of speech. When this topic comes to the forefront, in the Emerald City, it is one of the most upsetting scenes of the film—a transformation that seems almost horror-movie-like in its agony. It hints at the darkness yet to come in the second part of the story.
Without the second act, the character arcs are incomplete, and none more so than that of Glinda (whose name is originally Galinda; she changes it for reasons). She doesn’t like Elphaba, and then she does, because Elphie does something nice for her and Glinda suddenly understands that everyone has feelings, even brusque green girls. She sings her big number, “Popular” (lar) (sorry, it’s impossible to stop doing that), and then, voila! Besties! Very little is asked of Glinda other than to share her spacious suite with Elphaba, and maybe to, for once in her life, acknowledge when someone has given her what she wants. (What she wants is to study sorcery, something for which she has displayed zero talent.)
Grande certainly has the chops for the role; her operatic displays in the opening number, “No One Mourns the Wicked,” sound effortless, and those who know the show will catch the ache hidden in her words. She and Erivo both more than match the expanded score, which is one of the most delightful parts of the movie: The limited Broadway arrangements burst into full color courtesy of the London Symphony Orchestra, soaring and rich. It is almost odd to go back and listen to the original versions, which seem so bare-bones in comparison.
And that leads to the elephant in the room: Kristin Chenoweth. The role of Glinda was originated by Chenoweth and written with her in mind, and as I watched Grande I began to wonder if it is actually possible to play Glinda without seeming, at least a little bit, as if one is trying to slip into Chenoweth’s skin. How else could Glinda be? Sweeter, as it turns out; Grande is cotton candy on a lollipop even when she’s being self-serving. How could Elphaba resist her eventual friendly advances? Who could turn this girl down?
But what makes this Glinda most frustrating is that director John M. Chu (In the Heights) seems to want the movie to belong to her. She is pink, she is present, she has tiresome minions who follow her everywhere (why put Bowen Yang in this thankless role?). She is constantly in the light, and the light seems to cater to her more than to Erivo. This is never more apparent than in “Defying Gravity,” the showstopper song that ends the film. This is Elphaba’s chance to shine. It is her moment of becoming, of having just realized that the Wizard (Jeff Goldlum) isn’t going to give her what she wants—and that what she wants has changed.
This is not a song that needs embellishment, even when it is carrying the weight of the film’s climax. It’s a song of clarity and purpose, here dressed up with stops and starts, a peculiar vision, and—most unforgivably—unfortunate lighting. Elphaba keeps slipping from the spotlight, her face half in shadow or backlit for far too much of her moment. Grande glows, blurry in the background, catching the eye.
Elphaba should be vibrant. She should be glowing. She should not be shot against a dark CGI sunset that leaves her barely more than a silhouette in the sky. Some of the other songs are staged inventively, and it’s a travesty that this one is not.
Many of the sets and effects in Wicked are practical, and yet they often look, as the writer Meg Elison observed after the first trailer, like everything might secretly be cake. I simply cannot improve on this observation, despite having watched a really quite fascinating 20-minute featurette in which the production designer talked about all of the sets and their design and construction. (Still, bravo to everyone who made the “Dancing Through Life” sequence tick.) To the detriment of the emotional weight this story ought to have, Oz never looks real. It never looks like a place people would live in—not the flower-dotted homes of the Munchkins, not the confectionary towers of Shiz, and not the chilly halls of the Emerald City.
This works differently in a stage show. The unreality that a theater audience is prepared to accept is massively different from what we expect at the movies—and the set for Wicked, the musical, is one of its strongest points, clever and mechanical. I wanted to climb around in it and peer at all its workings. In the movie, I just wanted to take some of the polish off. Everything is glossy. Everything is so impractical that I kept being distracted by questions I did not want to ask. How do the books stay in the spinning wheels of the library? Where do all the rest of the students live? Why is the landscape outside of Shiz so nonsensical? Where on earth is the Ozdust Ballroom when it seems there is no town anywhere nearby? Why is there a random back door in Shiz that leads to a wheat field, and why is that where Elphie sings half of “The Wizard and I,” her first big number? (The bluebirds and rainbow just don’t justify it.) I have questions. I would prefer to have feelings.
And this is where Wicked, generally, falls down a bit. The film is more than an hour longer than the first act of the musical, but what Chu and screenwriters Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox have added doesn’t add much depth. We don’t need to see Elphie being bullied in childhood; when she gets to Shiz, everyone is immediately mean and rude to her. It is clear this is not new. We don’t need more of her father (why would she ever bother writing to this man, as she does at the start of “What Is This Feeling?”), or the distracting cameos in the Emerald City. What we need are emotional moments to tie the songs together, to reinforce the connection forming between Glinda and Elphaba—and, on a lesser level, Elphaba and Fiyero. (Jonathan Bailey brings a lot of chemistry to a somewhat underwritten role; by the end of “Dancing Through Life,” every student at Shiz is in love with him.)
There are some good additions, like a scene in which Doctor Dillamond and other animal staff from Shiz gather to discuss the dangerous climate in which they find themselves. Their fear is palpable, and it leads directly to some of the choices Elphaba makes later in the film. But too often there is a sense of assumption in the way Wicked plays out, as if the movie expects that the audience knows the story, and therefore we will do the work of imagining the connections and emotional growth. There isn’t a song that the cast doesn’t knock out of the park (well, maybe not “A Sentimental Man”), but they’re like individual flowers in bud vases when you wanted a whole bursting bouquet.
But then there is Erivo as Elphaba. If the movie often feels tipped in Glinda’s favor, Erivo pulls it back, again and again, with her gravitas, with the set of her mouth, with a cackle or a grin. She delivers the emotional range that the movie so sorely needs, from her hopeful “The Wizard and I” to the longing “I’m Not that Girl” to the heights of “Defying Gravity.” But more than that, she fills the non-musical scenes with feeling, whether she’s worried about the animals or yearning over Fiyero or coming to some really terrible realizations about the wizard.
There’s a seriousness to her Elphaba that belongs there, but that no one else matches. When Glinda does a little shriek upon first sight of her, Erivo’s response—dry, tired, so used to this—speaks volumes. This has always been a story about being other and being true to yourself; about fighting to be treated fairly, kindly, like an equal; and about fighting for those who are being oppressed. Wicked can be clunky and heavyhanded in its delivery, but the message is well meant, and stronger than ever in Erivo’s hands. Her Elphaba is green, but her Elphaba is also Black. The layers this brings to the finale, in which Elphie is defiant and Glinda anxiously clinging to established power, are unmissable.
It feels a little bit wrong to judge Wicked on half of itself, but this is how the studio has released it, and this is all we get to see for now. When I think about Erivo’s performance—her eyes sharp above freckles; the way she lets herself a little bit more loose in each song; the things this character has before her—I get goosebumps. She brings something deeper, something true, to this shiny, cake-like production. She is almost in her own version of Wicked, and occasionally the rest of the film catches up to her.
