Musicals have a particular kind of fandom. Some people have seen Les Miserables a hundred times. I believe some people who went to every single night of Hunting of the Snark, despite it being a legendary turkey. And obviously the audience of Rocky Horror provide a sort of interpretive counter melody to what is happening on stage. Wicked is clearly very popular. This was the cinematic event of the year: I know that because it said so on the poster.
There have been some rather desperate attempts to create a new Barbenhiemer around it. That's when people go and see two very different movies on the same day. Wickedator or Gladiked don't have the same ring. Gladdington goes better. Wicked reminded me of Barbie to some extent. A certain archness in the delivery. A universe constructed of oversized toys. Lots of colour; quite a lot of it pink. A film which invites us to laugh at and critique silly girlie prettification while enjoying it at the same time. The fact that I entirely failed to get it.
So what are we actually watching?
The first two thirds of the movie is a bog-standard American high school romance. The characters are college age, but wear school uniforms and sit in rows at wooden desks. I have no idea if that's a deliberate gag or merely an artefact of the US and the UK being divided by a common educational system. We have a geeky, unattractive, unpopular girl (Cynthia Erivo) forced to room with a good looking, wildly popular, bitchy room mate (Ariana Grande-Butera). We have the spoiled out-of-town posh boy who's been thrown out of lots of other schools (Jonathan Baile) exerting a bad influence. We have the salt-of-the-earth home-town (Ethan Slater )lad who asks the nice disabled girl (Marissa Bode) to the prom where they unexpectedly wow everyone on the dance floor. We have a wise old lecturer (Peter Dinklage) who everyone is prejudiced against because of his race, and who the Gestapo come and arrest at the half way point, forcing everyone to decide which side they are on. There's a prom scene and a library scene and a make-over scene.
It's not quite done as skit. Glinda is eminently dislikable and Elphaba genuinely wins our sympathies. But the dead-pan use of tropes is clearly a joke in itself.
The last third of the movie is a bog-standard chosen-one super-hero origin story. The nerdy heroine is invited to the big city by the mentor figure; it transpires that she is the only one who can read his magic book. She spots that the mentor figure is a fraud and a baddie and uses the powers in the magic book to facilitate her escape. At various points in the story she acquires elements of her costume, and only in the final seconds does she become her Iconic self. Whereupon a big "to Be continued" appears on the screen. I guess most of us missed the small "Part I" on the opening credits. It's going to take a full six hours for the movie to come to any kind of point. Although given the amount of time and musical reprises there are between Elphaba deciding to reject the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) and actually whooshing away on her broomstick, it wouldn't surprise me if they spin it out for much longer.
The very generic story is wrapped up in a sort of acid-trip flanderisation of our half memories of watching the Wizard of Oz on TV in the olden days. The opening scene (just after Dorothy kills the Wicked Witch of The West) nods to the original Munchkin village fairly vigorously, although Glinda the Witch of the South, resplendent in a magic bubble, is sanctimonious, as opposed to actually good. And the Munchkins are just people. Is there going to be a plot point that their shortness was evil wizardly propaganda, or is it just hard to persuade short actors to play these kinds of novelty roles? The most famousest and shortest actor, Peter Dinklage, was reduced to playing the voice of a goat.
But once the story goes into flashback -- Glinda is supposedly explaining how the Witch of the West came to be so wicked -- Oz becomes a pageant of CGI tomfoolery. All very pretty, of course: psychedelic fluorescent flowers that pop up for no particular reason; college library stacks on the inside of rotating cylinders; very convincing talking animals and of course reams and reams of dancers around every single corner. But fantasy requires some kind of secondary belief or coherent world building, particularly if we are supposed to feel Really Empowered when Elphaba announces, repeatedly, that from now on she will be defying gravity. When Glinda decides that she is going to give her un-glamorous roommate a makeover, every single item of furniture in the room unfolds into some pink, chocolate-box wedding cake beautification device. If you like being pummelled over the head with marshmallow and candy-floss, it's quite clever. And the people who are going to watch it dozens of times will find plenty to look at. But there is such a thing as CGI fatigue.
I am not one of those who uses "CGI" as a catch-all descriptor of the kinds of movie they don't like. I don't regard it is a heinous sin against our lord Harryhausen. The ability to translate imaginative artwork into apparently real landscapes and creatures is a fine thing. People who are much cleverer than me always claim that it looks flat and artificial. My problem is that it is too easy. If you can create a hundred million billion flying monkeys at the flick of a button and put them into a non-euclidian green city, there is a serious danger that you will do so. And the overall effect is not realism, but the absence of realism. Less is more and more is much too much
I have not read the book or seen the stage-play. It's quite a lot of years since I saw Wizard of Oz, and I don't think I've ever read the book. It always seemed a little amoral to me. Some people are less physically courageous than others, and the message "you are only a coward because you think you are" seems perilously close to victim-blaming. It's too close to those Victorian children's books who are only lame and consumptive because they think they are. At one level we are clearly in Prequel Country: the Wizard asks Elphaba what colour she thinks his new rode ought to be; she casts a spell on his monkeys and rescues a scared lion cub from a cage. One assumes that Boq Woodsman (who did the impressive wheelchair dance routine) is due to have a terrible accident with an axe. But overall, I have not got the faintest idea where the story goes next.
Are we watching a super-villain origin story? Will Part II show who Glinda became truly good and Elphaba became genuinely wicked? "How did the bad guy become bad?" is a perfectly good question, but "Because she was bullied at school" seems a trite, sub-Stan Lee answer. Since Harry Potter we have all understood that adult life simply re-enacts school-yard rivalry on a larger scale; and the Oz college is distinctly Hogwartian. Gregory Maguire's original novel precedes J.K Rowling by four years.
Or is this a more radical re-working of the fairy tale? Are we going to find out that in the original story the Wicked Witch was the goodie, and the Good Witch was the baddie. There was some fairly sophisticated Potter fan-fiction in which Draco Malfoy turns out to have been misunderstood.
I am quite intrigued. But possibly not intrigued enough to listen to another three hours of mediocre pop music.
I am quite intrigued. But possibly not intrigued enough to listen to another three hours of mediocre pop music.
2 comments:
I am looking forward to seeing it, because I do like all the prior versions (the Baum book*, the original movie**, the original novel and the stage show), all of which do have different perspectives on the Baum text in a modestly fun way, albeit not earth-shaking.
I do take issue with "mediocre pop music" though; the score for Wicked is excellent, although I'm guessing that it is ill-served by the movie causing it to be effectively cut in half; it'd be like stopping a four-movement symphony halfway through; sure you get to hear the motifs, but not enough of the payoff to them. But whilst Schwartz is certainly no Sondheim, he's not just a hack either and there's a lot going on in the whole score that's more than just the individual songs. That's an inherent problem with scores for musicals though - they tend to be treated as 'just a bunch of songs strung together', a view which isn't helped by the too many that are!
*the original book is very much a Victorian moralising fable, so I personally don't hold that against it. And the novel of Wicked is hardly breaking new ground in terms of revisiting a 'beloved classic' but it does point up the hypocrisy of some of that moralising, which the musical leans into.
**I also quite enjoyed the movie "Oz The Great And Powerful" which treads the same sort of ground as Wicked but is far less subtle, which is saying something.
All those points taken. There are plenty of contemporary musicals I enjoy -- I rather liked the Barnum one with Wolverine in it -- but I didn't feel this had any songs I could remember twenty minutes after leaving the cinema. I did find the thing where the characters speak a few words before going into the next verse rather mannered and old fashioned.
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