The one thing you can say about WICKED: FOR GOOD without fear of contradiction is that there is a lot of it. Not just the running time, which feels like so much more than 138 minutes, but in the Rococo exuberance of the production design. So much production design. It goes beyond mere attention to detail and explodes into an ocular overkill as epic as the narrative intention. This excrescence of a fantasia on art deco provides a robust rebuttal to the Bauhaus movement as it rises as its very antithesis. Form and function don’t have even a nodding acquaintance here, which is how we arrive at a pistol that more closely resembles a Bugatti rather than a firearm, and a film that overloads the visual cortex within its first 15 minutes and refuses to give it respite until the closing credits.
It overpowers everything else, even Michelle Yeoh’s delightfully venomous Madame Morrible, and Jeff Goldblum’s casually sociopathic Wonderful Wizard of Oz. They steal the film from the vocal powerhouses that are Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, the green-skinned and now full-fledged Wicked Witch of the West, and Ariana Grande-Butera as Glinda and/or Galinda the Good, Oz’s figurehead leader manipulated with condescending contempt by Madame Morrible. Not that Glinda/Galinda’s narcissism notices, not until it’s too late in one of her many interludes of shocked self-realization that pair with the many interludes of reconciliation with Elphaba, who, you will recall, has turned her back on Oz’s nascent fascism to become a magical freedom fighter for animal and Munchkin rights. Another problem is the dampening down of Glinda/Galinda’s delightful insouciant narcissism that was such a guilty pleasure in the earlier film. Yes, character development is important but so is maintaining a grain of what made her so much fun.
And here is one of the many problems here. A narrative structure that doesn’t so much progress to explain the origins of Tin Man and Scarecrow as eddy and swirl to pad out the second act of the theatrical version into a film of its considerable running length. Not unlike the bubble in which Glinda travels, it’s pretty to look at, fairly compelling the first time you see it, but has little of substance to offer, at least nothing that isn’t a political retread of the previous film. The sharpest moment for that involves Nessarose (Marissa Bode) and Boq (Ethan Slater), she the new mayor of her town and he the Munchkin chamberlain who discovers that true love is, ahem, trumped by power.
As for Erivo and Grande-Butera, the emotional impact of their journey as manufactured villain and broken-hearted friend forced to go along with the government propaganda is undercut by that ci-mentioned swirling eddy of narrative structure. It works in GROUNDHOG DAY, but not here. Sure, it provides Erivo to make a whole passel of those sweeping exits, cape flying dramatically as she rides her broomstick through the nearest window, but the third time or so, trope fatigue sets in. Nor does the romance between Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) and Elphaba generate even PG-13 heat. Not that there aren’t clever touches, particularly when the Wizard toys with a balloon map of Oz, a la Chaplin in the THE GREAT DICTATOR. Or the excellent rendering of the Tin Man and Scarecrow that nods to the 1939 classic but also innovates respectfully.
For the most part, WICKED: FOR GOOD is drowned in a surfeit of passementerie and sequins, with every frame designed to dazzle you into submission. Even Grande-Butera’s false eyelashes don’t know when to quit with a length and thickness that might very well provide a butterfly effect to create another cyclone with a too sharp blink of her eye. The result is that when the farmhouse from Kansas finally drops in, the drabness of it comes as a blessed sensory relief. If nothing else, the entire effort make you appreciate the Bauhaus Movement all the more. And poses the tantalizing conundrum of how a film can overwhelm even as it underwhelms.
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