When Subtext is Text: Wicked (2024)

Yep, that’s a heavy handed lede for a reason. But before I get into this too far, let em be clear; I love Wicked Part One. I really do. I was expecting an expertly done, family friendly musical with lessons about being kind or whatever folded in. I knew from reading reviews of Gregory Maguire’s novel that it’s a resetting of Baum’s characters so that the Wicked Witch of the West is framed in a heroic light and Glinda, not so much. 

Never saw the musical on stage but was familiar with a couple of tunes and overall, was apathetic enough not to care to ask what, if anything, I was missing out on. 

I think, maybe I should have.

Since the film’s only been out a short while, I’ll avoid spoilers, but I can’t guarantee I’ll be avoiding spoilers territory completely. Besides, I don’t think there’s much that most people haven’t gotten from reviews plot wise. What hooked me in were the following:

Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande absolutely bringing it. I can’t remember when two performers dominated a story so completely and so well. They weren’t showboating; they simply established conclusively that this wasn’t necessarily an ensemble piece. And that’s saying something given that Michelle Yeah and Jeff Goldblum are part of the ensemble Yes, they’re integral to the story as is everyone else, but the women centermost aren’t just the leads in terms of screen time, they’re also the expressions of the second hook that got me.

Holy Thematic Richness, Batman! I wasn’t expecting a thoroughgoing critique of the political-cultural moment we find ourselves in with no canned, easily digestible homilies to help make the audience feel better. I walked away shaken more than elated because I really want Elphaba (Ervio) to become Wanda Maximoff and either burn Oz to the ground or put them inside a Hex, furrow into their brains, and forcibly make these assholes better people. 

My understanding is that Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox toned down Maguire’s portrayal of Ozians of racist, othering pricks, as well as some Grand Guignol moments, but the stench of privilege that infests Shiz University, Elphaba’s family (well, her dad), and Galinda, who changes her name to Glinda, did something no movie’s done in a long time. It made me extremely uncomfortable for Elhphaba and then just kept me seething throughout the flick. 

Yeah, the subtext of where we are in this country and in many other places in these later stages of beaten down democracy and rising oligarchies and authoritarians is the text. It’s no more heavy-handed than it needs to be and it needs to be pretty heavy-handed. The idea of animals losing their voices and no longer being able to be equal to or co-eqyal with humans and the out in the open plan of penning and caging them is on the nose and maybe too much so for the elements in the country who have been - despite the movie’s box office - protesting “Go woke, go broke.” Well, this movie isn’t for them; though maybe if a few of them saw it, they might gain a little insight or self-awareness? Maybe?

Like I care. Of course, we also snap to inherent racism implied in the othering of Elphaba who’s got green skin and it’s extremely important and central that she’s played by Erivo, a Black woman who - and I don’t know how she does this - conveys loneliness, anger, and compassion all in one look. She’s the first lead, but it’s not a showy role. Nope that goes to Grande who has arguably heavier lifting to do. Her Glinda reeks of complicity, privilege, self-absorption, and the entitled cluelessness we see too much of and know too well. However, Grande manages to find the character’s apprehension of her dimness the more she spends time with Elphaba. Glinda’s not a caricature; she’s someone you know. 

She’s all the things I mentioned above, but you sense the confusion when faced with actually having to make a stand instead of perform one, when she recognizes that she can’t measure up to what she pretends to be all the while taking credit when opportunity arises for being a good person when she is anything but. But Grande finds grace notes to humanizer her; she’s motivated by fear. She knows deep inside she’s a small hollow kid with no understanding of the world or the ability to truly feel for others. However, she’s seen what it looks like. 

At no point in the film do you sense that Elphaba trusts her, until Glinda sets Elphy’s sister Nessaroes (an underutilized Marissa Bode) up with a munchkin lad (Ethan Slater) she has a crush on. She’s not doing it, of course, for Nessarose, but she is doing it to get Bok off her back (when he practically professes undying love, Glinda says that if he wants to make her happy, he could do so by inviting Nessaroes to the dance that night). When her sister tells her that Glinda made it happen, Elphaba requests Professor Horrible (Michelle Yeah) to accept Glinda as her other pupil in her sorcery seminar. It’s here the writing is exceptionally deft; I don’t think that this was Glinda’s goal but it renders the transactional nature of her relationships almost moot.  When Elphaba does show up at the dance after Morrible has told Glinda what Elphaba did for her, there’s shift in the dynamic. Something does shift in Glinda’s tiny heart-brain and she and Elphaba grow into a richer friendship. The sequence of Erivo placing her witch’s hat on the ground and miming a kind of voodoo-influenced dance is quietly spectacular. The idiots still laugh at her, until they don’t. When she joins her hand or claps them in their direction, they retreat. They know she’s powerful and they don’t understand her and fear her.

The newly arrived prince Fiyero opines that Elphaba “doesn’t care a tink” what other think about her and Glinda - sees that, in fact, Elphaba does. When Glinda steps forward and joins Elphaba in her dance, the tear streaming down from Erivo’s eye runs hot with something like maybe the hope of acceptance. It’s a remarkable moment for both leads and deepens both characters.

Later, as Glinda sings of making her new bestie popular, we see the changes in her dress and the way the other students treat her, waving at her instead of running. Even Nessaroes is accepting her sister more. Of course, there’s fuckery afoot. 

It isn’t long before the plot to enslave the animals and silence them becomes known when Elphaba follows her history teacher, Dr. Dillamond (voiced by Peter Dinklage) attends a  meeting with other animals who are sharing stories of their colleagues being disappeared and losing the power of speech. Before long, Dr. Dillimond announces that last day at Shiz just as a small group of uniformed men come in and take him away. Elphaba turns to her classmates and asks if anyone’s going to do anything or are they just going to sit in silence? After she’s told to calm down, they new history prof comes in with a lion cub in a cage as an example of what has to happen to animals in the name of safety for the humans. Enraged, Elphaba’s powers activate and the poppies she brought for Dr. Dillimond rise into the air and release their soporific scent and everyone but the prince fall into a stupor. 

He and Elphaba make off with the cub and you sense there’s more to him than his own self-acknowledged shallowness. Elphaba sees it; why would he care about the cub when he could have stayed behind with the others? They share the kind of unspoken glances that people in movies do and he goes off to find a safe haven for the cub and Elphaba sings about not being not allowing herself to hope and that she’s not the girl This becomes more pointed when she sees the prince coming joining Glinda (though he continues to look around, obviously for Elphaba). 

By this point, I was beginning to wonder how these threads were going to be joined but I really don’t want to say too much except that once in Oz, people reveal themselves to not quite be who they say they are (I think one of them is pretty obvious, if you saw the trailer), we learn the origin of the flying monkeys and this presents another thematic layer when it’s obvious that their powers of speech have been taken from them and they have been turned into the state’s surveillance system. 

This is a spoiler and I apologize, but it’s important to know that Elphaba insists Glinda join her on journey to Oz to meet the Wizard. What transpires there is ultimately heartbreaking but character defining and the last scene between Erivo and Grande brings us more forcefully into our current moment in this world that we inhabit. Glinda simply can’t go where Elphaba leads. And Elphaba is defying gravity and issues a warning to anyone who would try to ground her. I won’t say anymore on the film’s plot or action.

But I will tell you that John M. Chu’s done it again. The flair he brought for translating musicals to film in In the Heights is something like a promise fulfilled here. Working again with Alice Brooks as his cinematographer (they teamed up for Jem and the Holgrams and In the Heights, as well has her having shot tick, tick…BOOM!, another of my faves), the film is, for lack of a better word, stately. There is a genuine majesty in the sets and each shot seems to give equal footing to character and place, which, this being Oz, should be part of the point. The color contrasts to frame the wildness in Elphaba’s green is supported by her upbringing where her tutor is Dulcibear, a truly sweet bear voiced by Share D. Clarke, and you sense her connection with the natural world throughout, even more when contrasted with the pinks and candy colors in the scenes with Glinda. 

I wish I knew the music and the tunes better. There were some typically wonderful Stephen Schwartz lyrics and melodies, but I want to sit down with a lyric sheet and go through the whole soundtrack. Several times. Kudos again for Chu and Brooks’ framing Christopher Scott's choreography so deftly. There’s some tight second unit work going on and the CGI is well-integrated, in large measure because it was used more as an enhancement than as standalone effects. I get bored and check out when objects are too insubstantial and just sort of float in a frame. 

I haven’t said much about the supporting characters or actors because here’s where I feel some weak spots. I said Nessaroes is underutilized. This is mostly because Bode brings so much life to her and shades, but maybe I could say the same about everyone except Goldblum and Yeah. But even kn the latter’s case, along with most of the cast who aren’t Grande or Ervio, we have sketches as opposed to characters. Yes, it’s a musical and rare are the ones where supporting characters get too much of a chance to shine; but here it feels egregious when so much attention is paid to the smallness and selfishness of most of the repertory. This isn’t to say this is the case with everyone, but there’s a kind of perfunctoriness to Prince Fiyero’s coming around to Elphaba and the shift in sympathy between Elphaba and Nessarose feels less organic than because the plot demands it. 

On the balance of things, these are quibbles. In a film this long and this packed with songs, and where so much is so well-executed, I’m not going to gripe too much. 

As far as the length of the film, by the way, I think some cuts could have been made to make it more fleet. There was some lag time and I was getting impatient because too often there were scenes that lingered too long; they’d told the part of the story that needed to be told at the moment and there was no reason to hang around. Unfortunately, these also involved spoiler points, but my guess is that most folks can figure out what I have in mind.

The sets by Nathan Crowley (one of Christopher Nolan’s regular collaborators) and his team are, as expected, lavish, and credit where it’s due. The Schiz sets are unique (no Hogwarts knock-offs) and the Emerald City sets fill the screen like a Moebius-painted version of the 1939 The Wizard of Oz sets. There’s no slavish reproduction in the film, but there are some fun Easter eggs and call-backs. And here’s where I wonder about something I don’t usually give two figs about: what effect will Wicked have on rewatching The Wizard of Oz (or seeing it for the first time)? 

While I’m of the mind to treat each on its own terms, I feel as though one of my favorite movies of all times is altered by this new textual overlay. As I was watching, I couldn’t help seeing Billie Burke’s Good Witch as a conniving careerist and Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch now reads as a survivor of the worst kind of trauma, gaslighting, and scapegoating. But it’s Frank Morgan’s Wizard I fear will suffer the most from the retconning; here was this genuinely sweet man, in over his head, who imparts these lovely lessons to our friends on the Yellow Brick Road and he’s going to be re-read, revisioned as an authoritarian despot.

If there’s a bright spot, I’ll feel greater sympathy for the flying monkeys.