Wicked (Photo – Universal Pictures)
Even a good witch can get a bad rap, and that’s what Wicked is all about.
Wicked
Directed by Jon M. Chu– 2024
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan
Correction: will get a bad rap since this film is a two-parter, and the one in theaters now goes before the fall.
The story is told in extended flashback after the witch’s final meltdown. The witch, Elphaba, as played by Cynthia Erivo, born with green skin, is an outcast and is homeschooled until adolescence, when she enrolls at Shiz University, a Hogwarts-style institution whose curriculum seems to consist of singing, dancing, and magic.
The film’s first hour or more consists of her adjustment to her new settings and to the future good witch, Glinda (Ariana Grande)—vain, blonde, and ditsy. At first, Glinda looks down on Elphaba for her unfashionable wardrobe and general lack of cool, but their relationship evolves while Elphaba’s verdigris pigmentation sets her apart from the rest. I found the cast, however, to be of such programmatic diversity that this seems to be a stretch. No one seemed to notice that Cynthia Erivo looks a good dozen years older than the other students; maybe it was the green skin.
She is there, apparently, to develop her extrasensory gifts prior to doing postgraduate work with the Wiz himself. She buckles down and hits the books as indicated by the film’s best sequence where a library’s circular shelves rotate in suspended gravity while the cast does another song-and-dance number. A subplot that concerns a pogrom of the Shiz’s animal faculty (a bespectacled and presumably tenured goat is hauled away) marks time until the film’s third act.
Glinda and Elphaba, now besties, take the A train to the Wizard, where the palace is guarded by a phalanx of armed simians, right out of Planet of the Apes. By the time Elphaba reads from some ancient book, releasing a curse, the movie has taken so many ingredients from other flicks it seems scripted from a cookbook.
The movie’s chorus-heavy songs, every one an anthem of sorts, was not my cup of green tea, though I noted, in passing, the occasional clever lyric. At the film’s end, Elphaba rockets off in her aerodynamic broomstick. The witch goes west, to the region of hope and renewal, though as Part Two will no doubt show us, maybe not so much.
> Playing at Landmark Pasadena Playhouse, Regency Academy Cinemas, Regal Paseo, IPIC Theaters, Regal Edwards Alhambra Renaissance, AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, and AMC Santa Anita 16.
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