Wicked (Chu, 2024)

Wicked is a bright, loud paintball splatter of a movie — one that seems to me to be as uncertain of what it wants to be as it is how to be it.

I guess I should probably own up front that I am not a fan of the Broadway musical. As an enthusiastic reader of Gregory Maguire’s novel, I confess that the first act of the play, when I finally saw it, was one of the most disappointing theatrical experiences of my life. The resemblance between the story of the play and the complex political allegory of the novel was tenuous at best. That said, I’ve had nearly a decade to get over my disappointment that the play is not the novel and that the novel is nowhere to be found in the play. So I approached the film determined to try my utmost to evaluate it on its own terms

. Even with that resolution, however, I found it bloated and confused. I reminded myself going in that reducing a three-hundred-page novel to a two-hour narrative required subplots to be cut and actions streamlined. I was confused then by the decision to break the movie into “Part I” and “Part II.” What had been streamlined for pace was now slowed to a crawl. The additional time and space was not used to develop any of the storylines, only to extend the action scenes and musical numbers. Elphaba’s childhood is still reduced to a single encounter with teasing toddlers. The development of the friendship with Galinda is stated more than shown, to the point that when Elphaba says “come with me” when boarding a train to the Emerald City, I was shocked even though I knew it was coming. Where did that come from? No matter, within thirty minutes, the bond that was never forged is broken and we are not so much back to square one as left questioning whether we ever moved from it.

There are, I think, two types of stage musicals (though I tend to think of the distinction between the types as being a spectrum rather than a binary). In the rock opera format, the story is told through music and songs must develop characters and advance the plot. When done well (Hamilton, Les Mis), this structure can leverage the power of music to accentuate the emotional depth that is already present in the story. In the traditional format, a stage play, told through dialogue, stops occasionally for a “production” number. In such works, the pleasure is in the live, performative aspects of the spectacle, and film versions with edited musical numbers don’t have the same impact. Compare any random Fred Astaire number from a classic musical with the montage editing of Flashdance or Footloose to see what I mean.

This problem isn’t insurmountable. There are movies such as West Side Story that manage to capture enough of the performative aspects of spectacle to be as satisfying on tape as they are live. But not many, and Wicked is not one of them. Exhibit A is “Defying Gravity,” the song that is as close to Wicked gets to having a showstopper. If you are going to devote nearly three hours to the first act, then at least let that one song drop the curtain. It is designed musically to rise (no pun intended) to a climax, but the direction here doesn’t trust the simple power of a performer singing, however well, and thus must intercut the song with Top Gun aerial evasion maneuvers, complete with a Harry Potter close up freeze frame of the heroine in flight. (We are aware that the final shot of Prisoner of Azkaban is the most derided single shot in the entire film franchise, aren’t we?)

My point here is not that Wicked isn’t a great musical (though I don’t think it is). Rather it’s that judging from the way that Jon Chu directs and Alice Brooks films this scene, it sure feels as though they have doubts about whether the music’s power is sufficient to enthrall a movie audience wanting more traditional visual, action, and spectacle. Brooks did cinematography for tick, tick,…BOOM!, which, while also a musical, was one by necessity wedded to its stage roots, and one where the music and performances were not apt to get overshadowed by production design. As my high-school drama instructor used to say, “If the audience goes away whistling the sets, that’s not a good sign.”

Early buzz suggests I am in the minority, so if you are predisposed to love this, I am not trying to talk you out of it. But if you aren’t predisposed to love it, I am here to tell you that you aren’t crazy if you don’t.