Directed by Jon M Chu | Written by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox, based on the musical by Stephen Schwartz and the novel by Gregory Maguire | 160 min | ▲▲▲△△ | Amazon Prime
I don’t think it’s outrageous to say that 2021 was a peak year for the movie musical. The highest point for me was Steven Spielberg’s take on West Side Story, but close behind were tick, tick… BOOM!, Annette, and In The Heights, the musical Lin-Manuel Miranda brought to Broadway before Hamilton. The movie version of that show was directed by Jon M Chu, just like this one, so going into Wicked I was reasonably excited this might deliver a similarly good time.
I’m a whole lot more ambivalent about what Chu has done here. Wicked is a huge, cotton candy concoction of a movie with a salty liquorice heart. The thematic storytelling is strong, but the movie is relentlessly saccharine through its bloated running time.
Wicked is the cinematic adaptation of the wildly popular Broadway musical by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman that’s been running since 2003, taking home more than a billion dollars. It’s won Tony awards, Drama Desk Awards, and even a Grammy, loosely adapting the Gregory Maguire novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which got its inspiration from the turn-of-the-century L Frank Baum book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which, in turn, gave us the classic, The Wizard of Oz, in 1939.
The show and movie provides the backstory of the Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba, and, in support, the Good Witch of the North, Galinda, played by Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, respectively, with Jeff Goldblum also on board as the Wizard himself.
As anyone who’s seen The Wizard of Oz could tell you, The Wicked Witch of the West has green skin, which we learn here in her younger years made her a pariah. She’s a quiet, clever, and caring sort nonetheless, and even looks out for her sister, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who uses a wheelchair and is attending a candy cane Hogwarts of Oz called Shiz University in order to study magic. When they arrive it’s clear that Elphaba is the one with the real magical gift — when she gets emotional, strange things happen, and the headmaster, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), sees it right away.
Elphaba rooms with Galinda, who is pretty much unbearable — the model of the perfect, entitled popular girl, totally clueless for having never been denied anything. Though they’re oil and water to start with, eventually the two girls (who, like their classmates, all look like they’re 30) find a way to be friends. Do you think Galinda is going to want to give Elphaba a makeover?
Wicked pretty much indulges in every cliche of teen movie going back to Frankie and Annette. The production design, while full-on and gorgeous in the sets and costumes, just smothers you with scale and colour. (The iconic red slippers make a cameo appearance, but are swiftly discarded.) And whatever his many manifest talents are as an actor, can we acknowledge that Peter Dinklage can’t pull off a British accent? It was shoddy in Game Of Thrones and it doesn’t work here coming out of the mouth of a CGI goat professor.
Wicked is also stupidly lengthy — this movie could be something kids will want to see, but how will they survive this unreasonable duration, two hours and 40 minutes? I barely did, and I watch movies semi-professionally. Wicked is at times a terrible slog, especially through the second act. About an hour in and the magic school kids are going to dance with the roguish transfer student, Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), who’s handsome but wholly inessential to the plot, and I’m already wondering when this will stop.
And in case you hadn’t picked up on this, Wicked is a prequel to that 85-year-old movie, The Wizard of Oz. Just like so many other prequels we’ve seen lately, it singularly fails to justify its existence. That is until, suddenly, it does.
While this is, on its surface, a cutesy abomination that fails to capture the subversive joy the 1939 classic, especially the darker, more terrifying elements that gave generations of children nightmares but never undermined the timeless appeal of the film, it turns out Wicked actually does have something on its mind.
It’s taking one of the most recognizable villains in popular culture and giving her a rich and compelling backstory, celebrating her differences. It’s asking us to reexamine our biases and prejudices toward things, ideas, and people who are different than our own and ourselves — it does that slowly, but it does that well. It’s also the tale of a ruling class who want to control the people by telling them lies while demonizing a minority and denying language. Lots of relevant political and racial subtext there.
Elphaba is mercurial — at once wanting to be “cured” of her green skin, and wanting to protect the people she cares about. Eventually, she decides the best thing she can do with her power is to free others from oppression — all of a sudden it’s a musical Matrix, and she’s Neo.
Broadway fans will find a lot to enjoy, I’m sure — the songs are big and lung-busting and we get cameos from familiar faces who featured in the original company of that stage show. Erivo and Grande acquit themselves well, too. Grande especially is a terrific comic actor. Her character sure starts annoying, but as Wicked goes along some of the picture’s best moments are thanks to her timing and line deliveries. Bowen Yang shows up as another student and makes a great mean girl.
Even as this movie musical doesn’t come close to being as brilliant as those ones I mentioned above back in 2021, there’s no denying Wicked has an admirable subtext that keeps it from feeling like what it looks like, a theme-park ride. I still say it’s stupidly long and, yes, only the first part. Part Two is out in November 2025. Pray it’s shorter.
