Review - Wicked
Released 2024, 160 Minutes, Directed by Jon M. Chu
Jon M. Chu’s Wicked delivers a truly mesmerizing film adaptation of one of Broadway’s most iconic productions. The songs that are essentially the foundations of the film are powerful and chill-rendering, with vocals and orchestral ensembles that move you in more ways than one, but take these away and I don’t know if Chu did enough to effectively narrate the spaces in-between them.
I have really struggled to bring myself to write a review on Wicked. Nearly a month removed from seeing the film, it has become a sort of white whale for my prefontal cortex to passively develop my feelings on, and truthfully I think it’s because these types of movies are very conflicting for me. I sit there in the theater or at home watching, smiling like a kid in a candy store, truly and meaningfully enjoying myself, but as I leave the cinema or turn the television off, I feel a bit of indifference, if not slight malevolence, towards the film. But, like so many things that are not as binary as we think they are in this world, this feeling of delight can also be met by a general lukewarm afterglow. All of that is to say: I really enjoyed Wicked, but I did not think it was a good movie.
The pillars of this film were its musical numbers. They were electrifying, and the power and ferocity that a larger orchestral ensemble brought to the already incredible soundtrack, and how it enhanced the sensational vocal performances of Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, cannot be understated. But there were moments where I felt that this adaption of the original Broadway soundtrack did not serve the story. If we think about the structure of a film, we understand that there is meant to be this crescendoing pace throughout a movie which builds towards the climax of the story, and a great song does much the same, only it performs this as a microcosm of that experience over the course of 1-to-5 minutes versus the 2-plus hours of a film. That, you could argue, is what makes an incredible musical just that: there are these sprinklings of exciting lyrical climaxes that also work towards the eventual ultimate climax of a story. Where Wicked and Jon M. Chu struggled with this pacing was unfortunately during some of the most important songs of the film. You would have these excitingly paced powerhouse songs like Dancing Through Life, Popular, and Defying Gravity that were meant to excite and move you, but Chu drops in these pace-breaking moments of exposition, ones that literally pause the music at times, and when that happened, it felt like all the energy of the song went with it.
On top of this, to me, I felt that Chu was using the songs in their entirety as a storytelling crutch. The space in-between the songs was nothing more than a conveyor belt to the next musical number, which is a real shame when you consider how intimate and emotional some of these song-less scenes were meant to be. I expected more out of a director and production that essentially had 20 years to fine-tune the formula that already worked so well in the original stage version.
All of that being said, I cannot, in my indifference towards this film, understate the incredible casting choices for the movie. Ariana Grande was simply captivating any time she was on screen, and I would be shocked if she was not nominated for best actor in a supporting role. Cynthia Erivo brought a darker, more interestingly brooding aura to Elphaba that feels it serves the story quite well, with Jonathan Bailey delivering a superb performance on top of it all. And while I think CGI in movies can compensate for poor storytelling (this film is certainly no exemption to that), I overall felt the usage of special effects during the movie was a wonderful world-building tool that created that extra bit of magic the original production was not able to create by virtue of it being limited to a theater stage.
Jon M. Chu's Wicked delivers an exciting, but flawed, adaptation of one of Broadway's most iconic productions. Yet, as early as when I drove home from the theater, one question has echoed: did this film stand on its own as a cinematic triumph, or was it carried by the familiar magic of the original's iconic songs?
