As part of a smear campaign against the Wicked Witch of the West, Morrible attempts to ensnare the loyalties of Elphaba's closest former classmates: Glinda, the smiling but conflicted mascot of the Oztocracy, and the dashing Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), now captain of the Wizard's guard. But Fiyero's heart belongs to Elphaba, and although he and Glinda are forced to speak publicly, the air is thick with political and emotional subterfuge. This isn't the only romantic complication. “Wicked: For Good” is a little too much like “Oz: The World Turns” for my taste, although I would give most daytime soap operas credit for excellent production values. Why is this film, despite its lavishly gilded, emerald set, either too dim or too bright—so dazzlingly backlit that Oz seems to be under constant thermonuclear attack, or so dark that you can barely tell a monkey from a Munchkin?
As it happens, Munchkinland is now ruled by Elphaba's little sister, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who doesn't share her sibling's iron-clad honesty. Nessarose uses a wheelchair, and one of the most disgusting aspects of Wicked: For Good is the combination of physical disability and heartbreaking grief. Nessarose had nothing more to express; she is obsessive, thwarted jealousy personified. She resents Elphaba for her rebellion, just as she resents Sidekick (Ethan Slater), the munchkin she loves, for abandoning her to pursue Glinda. By the way, Bok's last name is Woodsman, and you don't have to be an Ozphile to sense the grim direction this whole thing is heading. Just follow the yellow brick road.
As far as I can tell, that's why Wicked: For Good exists: so that the events of Baum's novel and the 1939 film, forever linked in the public imagination, can take their place. But do they need to be maneuvered so clumsily and with such a flagrant lack of brains and heart? Over time, we're introduced to Dorothy Gale (a few flashes of tartan, for example) and force-fed origin stories for her fellow travelers that range from pointlessly contrived to gratuitously traumatizing. (Even if your kids can survive the Tin Man's arrival, the Scarecrow's crucifixion in the cornfield may be the last straw.) On stage, all these narrative retellings have a subtle behind-the-scenes wit, as if the story were being slyly outlined in the margins. On screen and in full force, it looks like an abomination—a parody of fairytale logic and pop cultural memory. By the time Dorothy and her friends march toward Elphaba's lair, it seems like something more disastrous than mere mediocrity is going on. It was as if the picture was so intimidated by its iconic predecessor that it could only respond with a petulant desire to destroy the classic it could never be.
Maguire's novel itself was written in the spirit of correction; his goal was to inject morally ambiguous modernism and adult, overt sexuality into Baum's squeaky clean delineation of good and evil. But at least on the carnal front the musical is made of softer materials. The less said the better about Elphaba and Fiyero's capricious seductive number (“Somehow I fell / under your spell / And somehow I feel / it's bad that I fell”) or what unfortunately passes for pillow talk: “You're beautiful,” Fiyero coos, and when Elphaba accuses him of lying, he replies, “It's not a lie. It's looking at things differently.” How about flattery?
Some legitimate passion really flares when Elphaba and Glinda, reunited through tragedy, allow their long-simmering rivalry to boil over in a fight of wand and broom. Which witch will emerge victorious—not just from this fight, but from this entire tense, confusing, hopelessly flawed movie? I'd say the film is lucky to have both of them in it. In the first part, Erivo made basic decency look dramatic; here it's nice to see Elphaba aggressively challenging the Wizard's regime. Grande also came to her senses. After her subtle comic jokes in “Part I”, she has the more difficult task of expressing Glinda's first real experience of rejection and disappointment. “It’s time to burst her bubble,” she sings of herself in the quavering ballad, one of two new songs, neither of which are memorable, that Schwartz wrote for the film. This rare moment of self-awareness comes at perhaps the worst possible time: Glinda is in her luxurious tower room, watching from above as the Emerald City descends into chaos.
It's tone deaf, but honest. “Wicked: For Good” is replete with references to the idiotic masses of Oz—their gullibility, their corruption, their stupidity. Elphaba uses this as a justification for why she must ultimately sacrifice herself and become the public symbol of evil incarnate: as she tells Glinda, “They need someone to be evil so you can be good.” The Wizard sticks to his version of this idea, confident that the public can be reassured by the illusion of a common enemy. The cynicism, while hardly misplaced, seems entirely undeserved. “Evil” films never convince us—the way The Wizard of Oz or Walter Murch's darkly engrossing Return to Oz (1985) did—of the fantastical reality of Oz as a real place. Chu and his writers show no interest in the history, culture, and politics of the kingdom, or even the potential stakes of the people's capitulation to the Wizard's fascism. The citizens of Oz are treated as nothing more than an undifferentiated crowd of extras, an ignorant and ultimately disposable monolith. The film's flattery towards the audience and our supposedly higher conscience is an expression of the same contempt. ♦
