Producers: Marc Platt and David Stone Director: Jon M. Chu Screenplay: Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox Cast: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Bowen Yang, Marissa Bode, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum, Bronwyn James, Sharon D. Clarke and Colman Domingo Distributor: Universal Pictures
Grade: C-
“Second Act Trouble” is a common term in the Broadway lexicon; Steven Suskin even used it as the title of his 2006 book. It focused on flop musicals, but successful ones have suffered from the phenomenon too, and despite its astonishing success, which has raised it to the level of a cultural icon, “Wicked” is a perfect example: even some of its most rabid devotees will admit that the second act isn’t the equal of the first.
Director John Chu apparently recognized that, and so in refashioning the hit show for the screen, he employed Dana Fox and composer Stephen Schwartz to beef up the second half of his two-picture concept by expanding the narrative to iron out the jerkiness in Winnie Holtzman’s original libretto and adding a couple of new songs, “No Place Like Home” and “The Girl in the Bubble,” to the largely unremarkable score. The result is that “For Good,” as the completion is titled after its supposedly show-stopping closing duet, runs for well over two hours rather than the single hour of the original stage version.
But the tinkering really doesn’t mark much of an improvement; in fact, in some ways it exacerbates the weaknesses. The plot is still jerky, with character motivations jumping back and forth so abruptly that you might suffer from whiplash trying to understand them. The new songs are at best ordinary. And the tone of the movie is dark and gloomy, despite the basic emphasis on the bond of sisterly friendship that can survive despite stresses and strains—the theme that has struck a chord with (especially female) audiences over the past two decades.
By comparison to last year’s predecessor, which was brassy and eye-poppingly garish, this sequel vacillates between gaudily overdone bright sequences built around Glinda (Ariana Grande) and brooding, depressing ones centered on Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo). The visual contrasts in Nathan Crowley’s production design, Paul Tazewell’s costumes and Alice Brooks’s cinematography are striking, but not in a good way.
One shouldn’t blame the filmmakers too much, of course. The fault really lies with the source material. Novelist Gregory Maguire, on whose 1995 book the musical was based, never successfully integrated his revisionist take into L. Frank Baum’s original stories or the 1939 film based on them, and seeing his attempt turned into action merely accentuates its weaknesses. The first half of “Wicked” on screen was mediocre; the second is equally bad, just in different ways.
To recap: Elphaba has escaped villainous Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), the evil power behind the weak Wizard (Jeff Goldblum). She continues her fight on behalf of Oz’s animals and, in an escalation of discriminatory policies, the Munchkins, whose land is now governed by Elphaba’s bitter, wheelchair-bound sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who rigorously enforces the cruel rules despite her love for her servant Bog (Ethan Slater), a Munchkin himself. (The preachiness is as heavy-handed as in the last film.) For her part Morrible uses fear and hatred to turn Elphaba into the Wicked Witch of the West in the public mind.
Her chief instrument in this is Glinda, the magic-free beauty who’s presented as the beacon of purity and good in contrast to her former friend Elphaba. Glinda is also affianced to Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), who is also now the Captain of the Wizard’s horsemen despite his residual love for Elphaba, which will become a major turning point.
Then there are the Baum characters—Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion—who are inserted into the plot, as well as the tornado that brings the Kansas farmgirl to Oz by Morrible’s machinations. (One of the more ludicrous elements of Chu’s staging is always to show Dorothy without revealing her face—a tactic some films about Christ used to avoid being labeled as sacrilegious.) The three are treated as pawns in Morrible’s schemes, and portrayed in rather nasty terms (especially the Tin Man, whose creation is presented in an especially disquieting way, though not as unsettling as the montage that depicts the formation of The Scarecrow).
The crux of the plot is how Glinda overcomes her vanity and ambition to embrace true, rather than false, goodness and embrace her old friendship with Elphaba, and how Elphaba’s dream of ending discrimination in Oz is achieved, though not without sacrifice. That would be fine if the twists and turns of plot and character motivation weren’t so bizarrely quick (even the flying monkeys change from threat to ally in the blink of an eye) and the explanations about what transpires weren’t so ludicrous. (That involving Elphaba’s escape from a watery death is a bit of claptrap that on stage is absurd, and on film more so. It’s also badly shot by Chu, Brooks and effects supervisor Pablo Helman.) And the “happy ending” for Elphaba and Fiyero in fact looks awfully bleak. As to the great mass of Ozites, at the end they look to be the same band of grinning, colorfully dressed nonentities who do nothing all day but wait to ooh and ahh over whatever outlandish display whoever’s in power deigns to favor them with as they always were; in spite of the glitz, the Emerald City feels like a very boring place.
Of course, none of this will matter a whit to devotees of the show, who will savor every moment of this elephantine extravaganza. And in truth there are some redeeming factors. Erivo and Grande—particularly the latter this time around—wring everything they can out of their storied characters, and though the songs they sing are second-rate, they give them their all—which is considerable. Goldblum brings his patented sense of whimsy to the Wizard, and his big number, “Wonderful,” has a bit of the Great White Way panache that’s sadly lacking elsewhere; it also benefits from the work of the effects team, which has also conjured up lots of CGI critters, many of the Disney-cute variety. (Sharon D. Clarke returns to voice Dulcibear, nicely, but Colman Domingo is wasted as the Cowardly Lion.) John Powell’s underscore is fine, and editor Myron Kerstein tries to keep things moving, if not always successfully.
But the rest of the cast offers little. Yeoh and Bode are dull and Slater, on the other end of the spectrum, hammy. Bailey is a blandly handsome hero (though anyone would have trouble with his character’s sudden switcheroos). And while Bowen Yang and Bronwyn James return as Pfannee and ShenShen, now Glinda’s aides, they have so little to do that they’re in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them category. For a musical, the dancing is minimal, especially for the principals; and in the ensemble numbers Christopher Scott’s choreography is again busy but robotic.
“Wicked” was a big hit, and “For Good” will doubtlessly be so as well. But one hopes that future composers and filmmakers will resist the temptation to seek inspiration from the myriad continuations Maguire has added to his first novel in what’s become a long series. That yellow brick road is not an inviting route.