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Passionate Performances Carry a Wickedly Mediocre Musical Act One

It’s been more than twenty years since Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked premièred on Broadway, and the window for making a relevant film adaptation with its much beloved leading stars Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel -who to Broadway fans owned those parts in a singular way few theatre stars manage to do in the modern era- would have been within that first ten years. But it never materialized then, and only does so now because of Hollywood’s obsession with intellectual property and this particular musical’s relationship to one of the most iconic and timeless of all movies.
In fact that very connection actually makes Wicked feel at home in the current Hollywood landscape -in waiting so long it found a time to be relevant again. Or one could look at the original musical, which -based on a book by Gregory Maguire- amounts with no disrespect to a remixed fanfic of The Wizard of Oz, as prescient. However you take it, after much delay the movie comes courtesy of Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights director Jon M. Chu, split into two parts to maximize retention and profitability -the second act is due out next November. Though just this first part is as long as the entire musical, and certainly it feels like it didn't need to be.
Wicked is known most popularly as the story that envisions the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz as a tragic and misunderstood heroine, a trope that it would popularize for other re-tellings of famous children's stories and fairy tales (its greatest descendant being of course Frozen, virtually designed around the themes of Wicked, down to having Menzel voice the analogous heroine). It is a simple but modestly interesting premise, using the character's uniquely green skin from the 1939 film -a choice only made so that she would stand out more in Technicolour- to additionally make a social comment on discrimination. Perhaps its most curious tenet though and the principal theme of the piece is its depiction of a close friendship between the Wicked Witch and Glinda the Good.
Comprising the first act of the show, Chu's movie spends most of its time at the outrageously named Shiz University, where Galinda, played by Ariana Grande, a vain and naive spoiled rich girl, meets and is made to be roommates with Elphaba (as in L. Frank Baum), a sharp and earnest green-skinned outcast with uncontrollable magical powers, played by Cynthia Erivo. It's a very Harry Potter-adjacent set-up (not surprising given it was written in 2002), and plays a lot in the tropes of your standard young adult school drama sandbox, including the clique bullying, enemies-to-friends character arc, and shared love interest in the roguish Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey).
It's all fairly tedious and you can understand why the musical spends considerably less time there. Moreover the design of the school, a cross between Potter and the blandly pseudo-antiquity plastic architecture of Disney live-action remakes, is rather drab and undistinguished. Barring the girls' dorm room and a library with one creative design choice, it's an altogether lacklustre atmosphere that casts the minimalism of the stage version as all the more evocative.
In fairness, Chu doesn't make much dynamic use of his space the way he did on In the Heights -perhaps limited by its artificiality. There’s not a lot of interesting choreography or distinguished shooting styles, and indeed one bit in a hairdresser’s is simply a compositional repeat from In the Heights. And the filmmaking elsewhere in the movie doesn’t stand out much either, certainly not where the iconography puts you in mind of The Wizard of Oz. Where the 1939 film was gorgeous and vivid in its Technicolour spectacle, Wicked’s colour scheme is fairly pale and muted -even as green plays so important a part in its story. When the movie finally reaches Oz, there is a marginal improvement in its visual character, though still nothing so radiant as what was done more than eighty years ago. A singular sequence however does stand out: the moment where Elphaba and Galinda come together -a highly emotional, atmospheric scene and evocatively lit, where in a change of heart due to an act of generosity, Galinda subverts her earlier attempt to humiliate Elphaba (through her iconic hat) by dancing with her at the big school function. There is a performance art nature to Elphaba’s dance that Chu does manage to replicate in how he lights and follows the scene. And it makes very good use of what are by far the movie’s greatest assets.
The fans might say there is no replacing the show’s original stars, but Wicked the movie does as great a job as it can. Cynthia Erivo is a transfixing screen presence in any movie, but Elphaba provides her most captivating showcase yet, and not just because it is her first chance to really emphasize the tremendous singing talents that won her a Tony and a Grammy for The Color Purple. There is clearly a substantial degree of passion and poignancy going into the part that makes it a deeply  affecting and earnest performance. And of course where it comes to the singing she is stupendous, even on lesser songs -of which there are a handful- like “The Wizard and I”. She of course gets Wicked’s traditional show-stopper, “Defying Gravity”, and irrespective of the somewhat haphazard way it is executed cinematically -largely in a very mediocre tower, paused at various points to hone in on goons politely waiting for their cue to spring on her- she blows the roof off with it, so successfully you’re surprised it doesn’t land on another witch. Meanwhile, Grande may be the biggest surprise of the movie, delivering a performance as the airhead heiress that balances out humour and heart -a sizable task given how mean the character can be. Somehow her sweetness never feels disingenuous. And Grande of course delivers well in her songs, the signature being "Popular". The two find a pretty decent chemistry, even when their characters are rivals -"What Is This Feeling?" being the other highlight song of the piece that they bounce off each other for.
It is a song that comically hangs on the movie's central theme of prejudice -Wicked being a very easy read as an allegory for racism or homophobia. Not only is Elphaba singled out and discriminated against for literally being a person of colour, but she herself has fierce principles against bigotry, which comes up in the context of Oz's treatment of talking animals. While the personal analogue mostly works, if in a very simplified and gauche way, the larger commentary on systemic oppression, the idea that power is maintained by designating a social enemy, is hindered by the dubiousness of the metaphor. Setting aside the inherent issues of likening marginalized groups to animals, and the egregious choice to make the scapegoat a literal goat (voiced by Peter Dinklage), it's just a thematically awkward and dimly contrived means of social commentary and especially so as the inciting point of Elphaba's "wickedness". Only Erivo's conviction gives any weight to its unconvincing sentiment, and even she struggles through some of it.
Michelle Yeoh as the school headmistress is fine, and Jeff Goldblum makes for a pretty good Wizard. They both factor into the ending, though you can really feel the story’s incomplete nature in the forgotten, but not particularly engaging threads relating to the relationship between Fiyero and the two leads, and Elphaba’s sister Nessa (Marissa Bode) -possibly the Wicked Witch of the East. As Elphaba flies away on her magic broom a “to be continued” tag promises the resolution to her relationship with the newly self-christened Glinda -the only point that we’re really all that invested in. But even for all of the movie’s dull qualities, it really earns that investment specifically. And I’m sure the same was true of the original show. Erivo and Grande, and the pair of them together, really carry the movie through the depths of its slog and make its high points hit much better than the context would deem them to deserve otherwise. Wicked doesn’t come close to defying gravity, but it just about levitates an inch through the strengths of its chosen witches.

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