“Wicked: For Good” Movie Review

If only. The source material here is the long-running stage musical “Wicked,” which was itself an artificially sweetened adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s far darker 1995 novel, “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.” On Broadway, it took two and a half hours, plus a fifteen-minute intermission, for the show to disgorge its story—an elaborate, through-a-witch’s-eye prequel to the classic L. Frank Baum novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and its immortal 1939 film adaptation. But, in reshaping “Wicked” for the screen, Chu and the screenwriters Winnie Holzman (who wrote the book for the show) and Dana Fox decided that more would be more. Defying brevity, they cleaved the movie into two parts—“Wicked: Part I” and the newly arrived “Wicked: For Good”—effectively doubling the running time to five hours and stretching the intermission to the length of a year. Such acts of cine-mitosis are hardly new in Hollywood, with a two-part “Dune” adaptation and a two-part “Mission: Impossible” adventure among the most recent examples. Are these choices driven by art, commerce, or a sliding-scale combination of the two? The “Wicked” split, at least, reeked of mercenary foolishness from the start, especially for those who recall how front-loaded the show’s meagre pleasures were. “Part I,” whatever its missteps, delivered those pleasures capably enough. It gave us Erivo and Grande, as well-matched as pistachio and cherry, and sufficiently full-throated to deliver fine new renditions of “Defying Gravity” and “Popular,” the show’s two standout songs, written by the composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz. Chu, who cut his teeth on the “Step Up” franchise, handled the large-scale musical elements of “Wicked” with a sense of showmanship. And the ensemble-juggling skills that he honed on “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018) served him well amid the cheeky shenanigans at Shiz University, Oz’s leading school of sorcery, where Elphaba, a bookish pariah, squared off with the beloved but less gifted Glinda. In “Wicked: For Good,” school days are very much a thing of the past. The Wizard has gone full dictator—a turn that Goldblum underplays drolly, with a sinister little “Can’t we get along?” shrug—and the consequences prove especially harsh for lions and tigers and bears. Once upon a time, the animals of Oz enjoyed equal rights with humans, including the power of speech, but most have now been struck dumb and either locked up or exiled. These Orwellian developments, like nearly everything else in the film, land with a self-serious clatter: “This is not the Oz I know,” Elphaba laments, springing critters from cages at every opportunity. She even frees the Wizard’s winged monkeys, which, more cursed than blessed by the gift of flight, have become a troop of wrathful shriekers. Not to be out-fumed, Michelle Yeoh returns, in a burst of hocus-pocus semaphore and bird-attack coiffure, as the Wizard’s most ruthless ally. Helpfully, she goes by the name Madame Morrible. (Was Crazy Witch Asian deemed too unsubtle?) As part of an anti-Wicked Witch of the West smear campaign, Morrible tries to ensnare the loyalties of Elphaba’s closest ex-classmates: Glinda, a smiling yet conflicted mascot for the Oztocracy, and the dashing Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), now captain of the Wizard’s guard. But Fiyero’s heart belongs to Elphaba, and, even as he and Glinda are pressured into a very public engagement, the air is thick with political and emotional subterfuge. Theirs is not the only romantic complication afoot. For my taste, too much of “Wicked: For Good” plays like “Oz the World Turns,” though I’d credit most daytime soap operas with superior production values. Why is everything in this movie, for all its lavishly gilded, emerald-studded set design, either too dim or too bright—so blindingly backlit that Oz seems to be under perpetual thermonuclear attack, or so murky that you could scarcely tell a monkey from a Munchkin? Munchkinland, as it happens, is now governed by Elphaba’s younger sister, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who does not share her sibling’s ironclad integrity. Nessarose uses a wheelchair, and one of the most wretched aspects of “Wicked: For Good” is its conflation of physical disability and soul-crushing bitterness. Nessarose has been given nothing else to express; she’s clingy, thwarted jealousy personified. She resents Elphaba for her rebellion, just as she resents Boq (Ethan Slater), a Munchkin she loves, for abandoning her to pursue Glinda. Boq’s surname, by the way, is Woodsman, and you needn’t be an Ozphile to sense the grim direction in which all this is headed. Just follow the yellow brick road. Maguire’s novel was itself written in the spirit of a corrective; it aimed to bring a morally ambiguous modernism and a grownup, forthright sexuality to bear on Baum’s squeaky-clean demarcations of good and evil. But on the carnal front, at least, the musical is made of softer stuff. The less said the better about Elphaba and Fiyero’s drippy seduction number (“Somehow I’ve fallen / under your spell / And somehow I’m feeling / it’s up that I fell”), or about what passes, miserably, for pillow talk: “You’re beautiful,” Fiyero coos, and, when Elphaba accuses him of lying, he replies, “It’s not lying. It’s looking at things in another way.” How’s that for flattery? Some legitimate passion does erupt when Elphaba and Glinda, reunited by tragedy, let their long-simmering rivalry bubble over in a wand-versus-broomstick smackdown. Which witch emerges victorious—not just from that catfight but from the whole of this busy, confused, hopelessly mangled movie? I’d say the film is fortunate to have them both. In the first installment, Erivo made common decency feel dramatic; here, it’s satisfying to see Elphaba in aggressive defiance of the Wizard’s regime. Grande, too, has come into her own. After her delicate comic high jinks in “Part I,” she has the trickier task of expressing Glinda’s first real experience of rejection and disillusionment. “It’s time for her bubble to pop,” she sings of herself, in a quavering ballad—one of two new songs, neither memorable, that Schwartz wrote for the film. This rare moment of self-awareness arrives at perhaps the least opportune time: Glinda is in her luxurious tower room, watching from on high as the Emerald City descends into chaos. It’s tone-deaf but honest. “Wicked: For Good” is littered with references to the idiot masses of Oz—their gullibility, their venality, their stupidity. Elphaba uses this as justification for why she must ultimately sacrifice herself and become a public symbol of evil incarnate: as she tells Glinda, “They need someone to be wicked, so that you can be good.” The Wizard espouses his own version of this idea, confident that the public can be appeased by the illusion of a common enemy. The cynicism, although hardly misplaced, feels thoroughly unearned. The “Wicked” movies never convince us—in the way that “The Wizard of Oz” or Walter Murch’s darkly thrilling “Return to Oz” (1985) convinced us—of the fantastical reality of Oz as an actual place. Chu and his screenwriters evince no curiosity about the history, culture, and politics of the realm, or even about the potential stakes of the people’s capitulation to the Wizard’s fascism. The citizens of Oz are treated as no more than an undifferentiated crowd of extras, an ignorant and finally disposable monolith. The movie’s flattery of the audience, and of our supposedly superior conscience, is an expression of the same contempt. ♦