Review: Wicked: Part I (2024)

 Wicked: Part I (2024)

Rated PG-13 for some scary action, thematic material and brief suggestive material

Score: 4 out of 5

Many years ago, back when I was in middle school, I went on a class trip to Broadway to see Wicked, a musical adaptation of Gregory Maguire's novel of the same name that was itself a revisionist retelling of The Wizard of Oz from the point of view of its villain, the Wicked Witch of the West, featuring the original cast led by Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth. My memories are hazy, but I do distinctly recall enjoying it, with the highlight of my evening being the show-stopping performance of what has since become its signature song, "Defying Gravity", a song that Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, the writers of Frozen's music, leaned heavily on when they gave Menzel a very similar musical number in the form of the equally iconic "Let It Go". My mom, who was a chaperone, wound up getting the soundtrack and playing that CD in her car for years. I was never much of a theater kid, so I didn't really fall into the fandom of the show or the original book, but looking back, I'm not surprised that Wicked became the runaway smash hit that it did, a show that's still playing on Broadway to this day (the fourth-longest-running Broadway show in history) and has inspired many other revisionist takes on classic fairy tales. The only surprise, really, is that it took more than twenty years for a film adaptation of the musical to come out.

But it was worth the wait. This movie had its problems, to be sure, feeling padded out to the point that some of the themes it explored felt like they could get lost in the noise. When it comes to the important stuff, however, this movie shines. Its two protagonists were both perfectly cast, the music was amazing, it managed to pair a whimsical, often humorous tone with some genuine darkness lurking behind the curtain, and director Jon M. Chu made it beautiful to watch. It's a film that does justice to its source material and which I can see bringing a whole new generation into Wicked's fandom, and one where I'm excited to see the inevitable second half of it next year.

The main hook here is that this is an origin story for the Wicked Witch of the West, who was previously a woman named Elphaba Thropp. Born from an affair between her mother and a traveling salesman, she came out of the womb with green skin that caused her parents and her fellow children to treat her like dirt, bonding only with her paraplegic sister Nessarose. What's more, her skin isn't the only thing strange about her, as she seems to have some sort of innate magical powers. Now, Nessa is heading off to Shiz University, and Elphaba has been sent to help her move in. However, when Elphaba accidentally displays her powers in a fit of emotion, Shiz's dean of sorcery studies Madame Morrible takes notice and offers to make her a student and teach her proper magic. Elphaba eagerly accepts, hoping that this could be a stepping stone to meeting the mysterious Wizard in the Emerald City, even if it means having the rich airhead Galinda Upland as her roommate. Here, Elphaba and Galinda navigate college life, learn to become friends after their terrible first impressions, and get caught up in a conspiracy to suppress the rights of the sapient animals in the Land of Oz.

First things first, there is Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba. Nailing the look of the Wicked Witch of the West was the easy part, as she gets most of the biggest musical numbers in the film and otherwise has to more or less carry the whole thing. Fortunately, this is a task that Erivo, with her background on Broadway and the West End, pulls off remarkably. She may be just the latest in a long line of actresses who've played Elphaba, but as a fan of good acting and good show tunes, I can certainly say that not only did she honor the part and do it justice in such a manner that I can see her take on the character becoming as iconic as Menzel's, but she also brought a particular subtext that you don't normally see with Elphaba by simple virtue of who she is. A key part of Elphaba's alienation from those around her comes from the color of her skin, and while Erivo spends the film covered in heavy green makeup, it's not that difficult to make out the fact that she is a Black woman underneath it. (And a quick trip to her Wikipedia page will also reveal that she's queer and in a relationship with another woman.) With this, the already-existing subtext of Elphaba being a metaphor for minorities reacting to a lifetime of discrimination and abuse becomes something pretty close to outright text, especially when you get into the major story thread about the sapient animals facing discrimination veering into a campaign of outright erasure (a fairly obvious metaphor for Jewish people, LGBTQ+ people, or any other real-life group subjected to such), much to Elphaba's horror as somebody who can sympathize with their plight. When "Defying Gravity" kicked in, it felt like a pissed-off "screw all of you and your rules" from a woman who has Had It with both respectability politics and what others have done to her, and watching this in a theater at this moment in time in particular, when rank misogyny and racism have come crawling back out into the open, it felt downright righteous. Erivo owned the screen and knocked it out of the park, the kind of role I can see making her a star.

An even bigger surprise, however, was Ariana Grande (credited here by her full name, Ariana Grande-Butera) as Galinda. I've always known Grande as a pop star first and foremost, and as an actress only in Nickelodeon sitcoms during her teenage years that didn't exactly show off her range, not even knowing until now that she too had a background on Broadway as a young girl. What's more, her public image is the pinnacle of the modern "influencer celeb", known for having an Instagram follower count higher than the population of the United States. In short, a talented actress, singer, and dancer who still had the capacity to surprise me with a great performance. Which is exactly what she delivered, leaning heavily into her public image to play Galinda as more or less an exaggerated parody of her real-life self with all the worst elements played up for humor. She's a rich, self-absorbed brat who looks down her nose at Elphaba when they first meet and have to share a room, her attempts at activism are self-serving, airheaded, and disingenuous, and the fact that we know she grows up into Glinda the Good Witch seems almost comical at first. Grande is clearly playing Galinda as a more modern version of the archetypal "dumb blonde" than Chenoweth did, but like Erivo, she does the role justice while clearly enjoying herself in it.

As for the look of the film, much hay has been made over how director Jon M. Chu tried to make the visuals more grounded in realism as opposed to the vibrant colors that the original 1939 movie is famous for, but if that's the case, then maybe I'm just desensitized by the flat color palettes of modern movies, because I thought this looked incredible. Chu has a long track record directing both movie musicals and dance films, and he put that talent to great use here, not only showing off the musical talents of Erivo, Grande, and a supporting cast stacked with both character actors and Broadway veterans but also giving the film's fantasy-with-a-touch-of-steampunk world the room it needs to shine. This was always a fun film to actually watch, even when the plot was getting into some heavy territory, a modern movie musical that wasn't ashamed to fully embrace being a musical while taking full advantage of everything that you can do on screen that you can't on stage. Big set pieces like Elphaba taking flight, or things like the talking animals, get exactly the glow-up you'd expect in a Hollywood blockbuster adapted from a stage play where all the effects have to be practical and capable of fitting onto a stage and being reset in a matter of hours for the next showing. This movie felt big, showy, and and epic in all the right ways.

Unfortunately, size was a double-edged sword here, and the source of this movie's biggest problems. The stage play runs for roughly two hours and 45 minutes, including a 15-minute intermission, and yet despite this movie explicitly covering only the first half of the musical, it has a runtime almost as long. Only some of the bloat can be attributed to the filmmakers taking the opportunity to stage more elaborate scenes, as there are a lot of long stretches of nothing at all taking place to the point where, when the plot suddenly kicked back in, it was at times a jarring shock. While the film was gorgeous to watch and listen to, the pacing was jerky and stop-and-go and often left me wondering when it would get moving again. What's more, a lot of these added scenes did little to get me invested in any of the characters they were focused on. I barely cared about Elphaba's love interest Fiyero, and Nessarose (whose importance to the plot was largely in the second half) had barely anything to do here beyond serve as a prop. In all honesty, this should've been one movie rather than two, even if it would've meant dragging out the runtime to over three hours. There were a lot of moments that I believe could've been cut to not only bring the runtime down but also, more importantly, tighten up the pacing without sacrificing the music or the wonder here, but modern Hollywood, unfortunately, is finding itself increasingly warped by the binge-watching economics of streaming, which favors movies that get downright decadent with their runtimes so that people will stay tuned in for as long as possible.

The Bottom Line

Even with its bloat, this is still a damn good movie musical carried by two standout performances and a ton of style. Whether you're a fan or a newbie, this is, for better or worse, a faithful translation of what made the Broadway show so memorable to the silver screen, and one I'd happily recommend.