Sad girl singalong

Wicked is sentimental entertainment. I'm not above it.

[Yikes! The Academy Awards are Sunday! I’m an Oscar nerd and I have less than a week to finish up the Best Picture nominees! Will I make it? Reviews of A Complete Unknown, The Brutalist, Conclave, Nickel Boys, Emilia Pérez, and The Substance are already up.]

All musicals are ridiculous, every bit as ridiculous as any cynic will reflexively tell you they are. They’re sentimental cheese on a cracker, even when they’re written by geniuses. (I love Sondheim but come on, Sweeney Todd is a Broadway Baby’s idea of adult entertainment.)

But don’t count out sentiment. Even Homer had a loyal-dog scene. Though Wicked, Part I, is, in the broadest terms, subversive of a prior sentimental story, it is borne aloft on clouds of the purest sentiment — in fact, on smart-but-lonesome-teenage-girl-with-big-dreams sentiment, which is perhaps the most lethal variety, and of sufficient intensity in this case to require sing-along showings in major cities across America to dispel it, lest its scale and mass cause Carrie-level cataclysms.

Not everyone can get with that energy, right away or at all — for the first fifteen minutes or so I was grinding my teeth.

The design of the film takes some getting used to, by which I mean that I never did. It’s really… design-y, the product of obvious effort and expense and server-farms’ worth of CGI. On the one hand it’s sleek and sometimes witty — the giant train that takes the principals to meet the Wizard is a hyper-extension of old American train tech worthy of Bruce McCall, and a pan from the stately trot of a horse to the similarly-choreographed gait of the Fashionable Braggart character is an excellent joke. But there seems to be no unifying idea to that design except that it be lush enough to make people forget the stage version, and suggest steampunk without getting scary about it.

The camerawork is hyperactive, very much in the whirligig manner of Emilia Pérez, and between that and the choreography — particularly in a fantasy number set in a stylized library that sends dancers diving among gyroscopic book ladders — the dazzle inevitably devolves to razzle. Also it smells like AI.

But the thing that made Wicked a stage hit (more than the Stephen Schwartz score — yes, that Stephen Schwartz, still holding his position at the center of Broadway culture 50 years after Godspell) is the Wizard of Oz inversion — focusing on Elphaba, the “Wicked Witch” allegedly crushed by Dorothy’s house near the beginning of the 1939 movie, and her relationship with Glinda, “the good witch” from that movie, back when they were both teen students at Shiz University in this Oz alt-universe. And that’s what carries the film.

To condense (and there’s a lot to squeeze in, considering this two-and-a-half-hour movie is just Part I), Elphaba and Nessarose are the daughters of Munchkinland Governor Thropp. Elphaba, issue of an unacknowledged tryst between her mother and a traveling salesman, is green-skinned and despised, and nursed not by her parents but by talking animals apparently common thereabouts; her sister Nessarose’s legs are paralyzed, the result of her parents’ extreme attempts to ensure she’d come out of the womb white. Elphaba is protective and loving toward Nessarose, which protectiveness expresses itself in her nascent magical powers; Nessarose nonetheless shares at least some of her parents’ disdain for Elphaba, and discourages her from “making trouble” with her supernatural gifts.

If you’re smelling contemporary resonances, collect your winnings at the door. The hints of a dark subplot involving the talking animals, set to play out in Part II, make it seem even more aggressively anti-traditional. But it’s more accurate to say Wicked leans on the timeless (or at least 20th Century) convention of musical outcasts like Show Boat’s Julie La Verne and Carousel’s Julie Jordan, and gives it a little — well, a lot of — feminist charge.

At Shiz, Elphaba is thrown in the path of Glinda (here “Galinda,” initially), a narcissistic, status-obsessed proto-sorority girl who wants by right the privileges Elphaba could, had she the self-assurance, claim by talent. (You can see why it hit so big; the poignance of isolation and dreams of discovery are the missing-mother’s milk of the genre.)

The young women are forced to be roommates, hate each other, then slowly warm up. The cause of their warming is not too much spelled out — which I, by that point pretty well warmed up myself, didn’t mind, because I knew from convention it simply had to happen; the sad smart girls, and the status girls who secretly relate, are at the singalong, demanding it!

The actors fill in the dramaturgical blanks in the elevated style of stage musicals. (In one of those mysteries of cinema, this seldom works with straight-play adaptations but nearly always goes down a treat with musicals.) As Elphaba, Cynthia Erivo starts out recessive and sad, but with intense magnetism — the green makeup just accentuates her severe beauty — that reads as repressed power, which spectacularly un-represses (but stays sad) as she goes along. As Galinda, Ariana Grande is a showy mess of entitlement, flouncing and flipping her hair in (usually successful) pursuit of attention.

Galinda tries this on Elphaba — her performative face-down flop on her bed at one point is a real laugh-out-loud moment — and when the green girl won’t buy it she’s challenged, threatened, and initially cruel.

But, in a scene at a big dance party engineered by Galinda to humiliate Elphaba, the sorority girl realizes her sorrow — “she doesn’t give a twig about what anyone else thinks,” the Fashionable Braggart says; “of course she does,” Galinda says, “she just pretends not to.” She goes to Elphaba’s rescue, dances with her, touches her face and feels the tears, wipes them away, embraces her NO I’M NOT CRYING, BRITNEY, YOU’RE CRYING!

I also cried at the big climax — mild spoilers here — when, long story short, Elphaba figures out the Wizard and a few other things she believed in were bullshit and goes full Wicked Witch and has to leave Galinda-now-Glinda (long story) behind to her destiny as a suck-up in the all-stops-out “Defying Gravity” number. Yeah, it’s somewhat about the real disillusionment any of us will face when we learn what the world really is, and a couple of different ways to react to it, but mostly it’s about the girls and their feelings and their parting, with the metaphor mainly a frame on which those big emotions hang. So it ain’t Aristophanes. So what? Like Avatar: The Way of Water, it caught me offguard right in the feels, and was worth the price of the popcorn.