Jon M. Chu’s film of the first half of the stage musical has two leads worth the ticket in Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, and songs staged with care. It is also 162 minutes long and the colours look drained. Good, if musicals are yours.
The stage musical Wicked has been running for more than twenty years, and Jon M. Chu’s film is the first half of it, stretched to 162 minutes. The screenplay, by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox, works from Holzman’s book for the stage show and, further back, from Gregory Maguire’s novel about the witches of Oz before Dorothy arrived. Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) is born green and grows up blamed for it. She arrives at Shiz University as her sister’s carer, is spotted by the sorcery teacher Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), and is put in a room with Galinda (Ariana Grande), who is blonde, popular and appalled. The rest is how those two learn to stand each other.
It is a good film with two fine performances and about forty minutes it does not need. If you like musicals you will have a good evening. If you do not, nothing here will convert you.
Erivo plays Elphaba small. She keeps her chin down and her hands still, and when she sings she barely moves, so the voice seems to come out of her against her will. Grande does the opposite. Galinda is all hair and elbows, and “Popular”, staged in the shared bedroom, is the funniest number we have seen in a film musical for some time, because Grande does the comedy with her whole body and then lands the notes anyway. They are good together. Erivo’s face, when Galinda is kind to her by accident, does more than any of the dialogue.
The scene we will remember is not a song at all. At a dance in the Ozdust ballroom, Elphaba turns up in a pointed black hat Galinda gave her as a joke, and everyone laughs, and she dances anyway, alone, with the music stopped. Alice Brooks holds the camera on Erivo and on the faces watching her, and Chu lets the silence run longer than most directors would dare. Then Galinda walks across the floor. We were moved more than we expected to be, and slightly cross about it, because we saw exactly what the scene was doing and it worked anyway.
Now the complaint most critics have made, and we share it. Nathan Crowley has built Shiz as a real place, stone and water and a great deal of both, and Paul Tazewell has dressed Galinda in pinks and Elphaba in black and navy so you can find them in any crowd. But Brooks lights nearly everything with a soft, even wash, and the colours come out drained. The Emerald City, when we get there, is a pale grey-green. A film about a girl whose whole life is decided by a colour ought to know what colour looks like.
Then there is the length. Myron Kerstein and James Finlan have cut the songs with care; the dance numbers hold on whole bodies rather than chopping at the beat. Between the songs, though, the second hour sits down. Dr Dillamond (voiced by Peter Dinklage), the goat professor whose fellow animals are losing their speech, carries the film’s politics, Jonathan Bailey’s Fiyero arrives with real charm, Marissa Bode’s Nessarose and Ethan Slater’s Boq have a strand of their own, and all of it takes longer than it should. By the second hour we were tired, and then we were annoyed at being tired, because the material is not slow on stage. Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard turns up late and does what Jeff Goldblum does.
John Powell’s arrangements of Stephen Schwartz’s songs are large without being loud, and the singing was done live, which you can hear in the breaths. The finale is the song everyone knows, and we will not describe how it is staged beyond saying that it earns its size.
Chu made In the Heights in 2021, a film that moved fast and knew where its heart was. This one is bigger and slower and much more careful, and the care shows in the good scenes and in the padding alike. It is a PG. Children who know the songs will sit through all of it happily. Adults who do not should be warned that it stops rather than ends, and that the second half is another film.
