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- “Wicked,” directed by Jon M. Chu, is a film adaptation of the iconic stage musical — well, just act one.
- Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande’s individual performances and chemistry carry the film.
- Though it can get bogged down in itself, for the most part, “Wicked” earns its lengthy runtime.
“Wicked” is expansive, indulgent, and a few minutes too long. It’s also extraordinarily, immersively good.
Directed by Jon M. Chu (“Crazy Rich Asians”) and starring Broadway and pop music’s biggest legends — Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, respectively — “Wicked” is a stunning act of adaptation. The stage musical version is also an adaptation, the looser kind, of Gregory Maguire’s novel of the same name. In 1995, the Wicked Witch of the West was turned into a tragic heroine named Elphaba.
If the novel reinterpreted the “Oz” canon, outlining what happened years before Dorothy’s house fell from the sky, and the stage musical transformed it into something new, Chu’s musical film also makes it feel novel.
The film follows the same beats as the musical’s first act: Elphaba, a young woman who grew up marginalized due to the green color of her skin, enrolls at Shiz University by virtue of her prodigious, natural magical ability. She rooms with future Good Witch Glinda and uncovers a conspiracy that threatens some of Oz’s most vulnerable. Challenging it, however, turns her into a villain in the eyes of the people.
Chu and “Wicked’s” screenwriters Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox benefit from the relative freedom of time and resources of a blockbuster film. While the film’s runtime looks absurd on paper — it sits at two hours and 41 minutes long and only manages to tackle the Broadway production’s first act — it would be easier to call “Wicked” bloated if its most expansive choices didn’t directly serve its central relationship: Elphaba and Glinda’s.
We see brief flashes of playful, snarky dialogue and prolonged sequences, interjected into musical numbers, that capture every beat of their changing relationship.
‘Wicked’ is focused on Elphaba and Glinda. Erivo and Grande’s chemistry sells it.
For the most part, “Wicked” doesn’t get too dialogue-heavy and relies on its musical numbers to advance the story. When it decides to stretch those numbers out, it’s usually for a good reason.
Those interjections range from a sly extra two bars to help a lyric sync to morphing already-long songs like “Dancing Through Life” into extended turning points in Elphaba and Glinda’s friendship.
As in the stage musical, Glinda lends Elphaba the ugliest hat in her closet for a party. She’s ridiculed upon arrival, but after she starts dancing alone, Glinda joins her, and the two become friends. “Wicked” takes its sweet time with that dance sequence — and, in turn, gives it the narrative weight it deserves.
That relationship wouldn’t work without Erivo and Grande’s individual performances. Grande disappears into Glinda, and only a few times will you hear a well-earned vocal styling reminiscent of her personal discography. Vocally, she soars and delivers songs like “Popular” with giddy aplomb.
Her performance shines best, however, in her comedic sensibilities. She riffs easily off Erivo, Jonathan Bailey, who plays a Winkie prince that the two meet at school, or her classmate sycophants, played by Bowen Yang and Bronwyn James. This should be enough to make her a best supporting actress Oscar contender.
Erivo delivers the film’s grounding performance, and she captures the vulnerability, naïveté, and girlishness underneath her character’s bristling exterior. When you finally hear her sing on “The Wizard and I” — the film’s standout number — it’s far enough that you’re waiting for it. Erivo, of course, smashes it, drawing on Elphaba’s deep sense of joy and curiosity as she fantasizes about the Wizard curing her social ostracization.
The one problem with ‘Wicked’
It’s clear that both actors, from their ineffable chemistry on screen, are having the time of their lives in these roles — and that goes for the rest of the production as well. In turn, if there’s one crime that “Wicked” commits, it’s perhaps that it loves itself and its source material a little too much.
The film goes to great lengths to pay its respects to the original stage musical, including in one utterly euphoric cameo best left unspoiled for the true “Wicked” enthusiasts. In other instances, like its repeated invocation of the “For Good” theme from Act Two in the score, it can feel too self-referential.
“Wicked” also starts to get bogged down in its tone-shifting endgame. Most egregiously, it crushes its momentum during “Defying Gravity,” in which Elphaba, now an enemy of the state after refusing to conspire with the Wizard, successfully gains the power of flight in order to escape.
Rather than letting Erivo’s extraordinary vocal performance and the music drive the film’s climax, “Wicked” bogs down Elphaba’s ascendance with too many brief action sequences, dialogue exchanges, and additional musical interludes. Toward the end of the film — and in anticipation of Erivo’s final notes — it’s too much.
In the end, though, “Wicked” is one of the best musical adaptations recently put to screen. Chu renders his vision of Oz with clear passion and verve and makes storytelling decisions that successfully argue why this needed to be a two-part movie.
At the very least, I won’t complain about getting another two (or more) hours like these ones.
“Wicked,” also starring Peter Dinklage, Michelle Yeoh, and Jeff Goldblum, opens in theaters on Friday.
