-Written by Kyle Bain.
I typically can’t stand musicals, but most of you know that by now–so, I won’t harp on that fact or beat a dead horse even deadier. So, I sat down to watch Wicked, a two-hour-and-forty-one-minute film, dreading what would come in the next [what would certainly feel like an] eternity. Was something inside me going to change? Would I be one of those individuals that walked out of the theater with a sudden love for the theater? For these characters? Or, would nearly three hours of my life be wasted on some nonsensical musical based on a Broadway production that I’ve seen and didn’t like? Well, let’s keep it simple to start: Wicked is far better than I anticipated.
There are two reasons why Wicked works, why I didn’t walk away from the theater scarred for life. Those things are the set design/world building and the voice of Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba).
I want to start with the positives here, because they effectively outweigh the negatives present in Wicked. So, let’s start with Erivo–the woman who, prior to watching the film, made something of a name for herself in the media (and not in a good way). It’s important to separate the art from the artist, and that’s what I did here with her performance. I would have hinderanced my own experience had I let her personal life influence my opinion of her in this film. She’s a wonderfully talented actor, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s her voice that ultimately blew me away. Erivo’s voice literally gave me chills, literally had me in my car on my way home from my viewing, humming (and sometimes even singing) the words to “Defying Gravity” a song that I’ve tried so hard to avoid over the years since seeing the Broadway musical. It’s effectively stuck in my head, and even as I sit here typing it’s hard for me to stop replaying the titular line over and over again in my head. Erivo, as a vocalist, is one of the most incredible things that I’ve heard this year–far surpassing what I anticipated would be possible.
Then there’s the world-building ability of this team–which, to be honest, was something that I anticipated being a highlight of this film. Dune: Part Two was meant to be one of the greatest spectacles of the modern era, but ultimately fell short in my opinion. Wicked is everything that this film hoped to be, everything that a fan of cinema could ever want in this regard. I felt immersed in this world, as if I were really there, and as a fan of The Wizard of Oz, it was wonderful to feel like I was part of such a magical and perfectly realized world.
Well, that’s just about all of the good present in the film–but like I said, even with there being only two things that I appreciated about Wicked, their presence is so powerfulistic that it helps to create a balance that I wasn't sure that the film would be able to achieve.
It’s Ariana Grande (Galinda) that plays opposite Erivo, and her singing is one of the things that is confusifying. I cannot understand why people appreciate her music. Sure, on an incredibly rudimentary level she possesses an effective tone–but that’s effectively useless when she’s incapable of annunciating. Through the entirety of the first song, “No One Mourns the Wicked” I’m not sure that I understood a single utterance of hers. The words melt together, creating something of a jumbled, inaudible mess. How can the star of a Broadway adaptation be incapable of annunciating? That’s possibly the most important part of the production.
I don’t feel like harping on the many issues that plagued Wicked, as we’d likely be here all day. The fact of the matter is, however, that nothing really works toward making viewers care about the film or its characters. I don’t know that I’ve ever cared less about a group of characters, and from start to finish I found myself bored with their stories, struggling to appreciate them on any level. Live or die. Friend or foe. It made no difference to me. Wicked is a relatively boring film, and the characters both suffer from that and help to make it even more boring.
Wicked is not a film that I anticipated liking in the slightest, but I walked away from the film with some positives. For Wicked, that’s a huge win. Did I love the film? No. Did I even really like the film? Still no. However, there were aspects of it that were entertaineous, and that’s far more than I could have hoped for.
Directed by Jon M. Chu.
Written by Winnie Holzman, Dana Fox, Gregory Maguire, & L. Frank Baum.
Starring Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Marissa Bode, Peter Dinklage, etc.
6/10 = WATCH IT FOR FREE
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