Wicked (2024)

PG and, honestly, it kind of deserves to be PG. I thought, for sure, that this would be one of those arbitrary PG-13 movies because it dealt with themes condemning xenophobia and danced around some queer characterization.  But good for them!  This is mostly a deserved PG rating.  There is a scary part with some of the flying monkeys that upset my 10-year-old.  But, God love him, he's a sensitive lad.  The PG is well-deserved.

DIRECTOR:  Jon M. Chu

Look at me, being crazy productive with my blogging.  It actually took me a lot of work to log in to my Weebly, so please appreciate the frustration that came with trying to make this thing happen.  Right now, I'm staying up late on a retreat, waiting for the junior boys to go to bed.  These fools tend to get up to nonsense, so I have to stay up super late to make sure no foolishness happens on my watch.  So what do I do?  I write my blog on Wicked while wearing some very fashionable Wicked sweatpants.  Trust me, fam.  They slay.

Everyone lost their minds about Wicked this weekend.  I was honestly concerned that I wasn't going to get a chance to catch Wicked in a timely fashion.  This movie is going to be all over the Oscars, right?  Like, I'd have to see Wicked, for technical credits alone.  Also, if I'm not mistaken, there are some original songs in this version, right?  Anyway, if I didn't see it soon, I would have hit my maximum level of FOMO.  The insane part is that I've seen the stage production.  I will be honest, while I enjoyed the movie, Wicked isn't necessarily for me.  When I saw the stage production, I was one of the few people alive who poo-pooed it.  Now, before you go swearing me off,  know that I tend not to crap on things just because other people like them.  Honestly, a criticism that you are allowed to throw at me is the idea that I like too many things.  So when I turned my nose up at the stage production, that was kind of a big deal for me.

Mind you, my criticisms of the stage production of Wicked were way off the mark.  My frustration was wanting Wicked to be something that it fundamentally was not.  I wanted what Maleficent has been promising: a retelling of a classic story from the villain's perspective.  And, to a certain extent, Wicked is that.  These are stories that I, at my core, do not trust.  There's a certain amount of lying that these movies take.  Instead of simply being another perspective, something fundamental about the story has to change.  To make the villain a hero, something that we have accepted as a truth cannot be accurate.  I don't really get where the charm comes by saying "This part never happened."  It's not all that clever.  

But now that I've seen the movie?  My obsession with the fact that Wicked ignores a lot of the core of The Wizard of Oz is borderline silly.  See, I've made my frustration with the results of the last elections...not subtle.  I'm borderline horrified by our country right now.  I don't know how we're going to bounce back from this and while conservatives are probably rolling their eyes at my liberal tears, I often wonder a thought.  "If I went back in time, could I somehow stop the results of the 2024 election?"  Until recently, I could not think of an answer that would give me the result I wanted.  Considering that I thought that Kamala Harris did everything right and still lost is mindboggling.  But now I realize that there might have been one thing that could have swayed this election and the answer is silly.

My theory?  Release Wicked before the election.  Allegory is a heck of a thing.  People hate being preached at.  But Wicked is a thing right now.  It's a talking point.  Considering that a lot of the problems with conservatives voting came from a lack of objective information coming that way, allegory might be the best way to sneak in a powerful message.  And that's where Wicked absolutely destroys for me. When I saw the animal allegory in the play, I was probably put off by it.  I thought it was this world-building nonsense and that it was distracting from the Dorothy narrative.  (After all, my thoughts were that the Wicked Witch of the West actively tries to kill Dorothy throughout the Wizard of Oz and I was angry that the play never tried to address how that was an objectively evil act.) But that animal scene is intense.  I wish it was all the way throughout the film instead of being a background thing because Elphaba's commitment to the cause of equal rights makes her not only the outsider who is trying to keep her head above water, but someone who is martyred for doing the right thing.

I mean, thank goodness the final act of the film full on says the theme of the story.  Jeff Goldblum's Wizard straight up reveals that he chooses to demonize animals because people tend to unite over a common enemy.  Can you understand how Harris could have ridden that message all the way to the White House?  I wonder if something at the studio didn't like that being a summer message.  I mean, I get that Thanksgiving weekend is a big weekend for movies.  I mean, I saw this and Moana 2 in theaters, despite having no time to see much of anything.    But making a comparison between the original citizens of Oz and the ostracized minorities in American society is so on the nose.  It would have destroyed.   I know that there were some conservatives I know who finally started pointing the fingers at themselves when that message was laid out so explicitly by Goldblum.  Why couldn't we have that message before Election Day?  *sigh*

Goldblum, by the way, is starting to get these roles.  You have to acknowledge that Thor: Ragnarök was Goldblum's complete audition for this movie.  Like, the Wizard is just a toned-down Grandmaster.  Like,  Jeff Goldblum is actually holding back a bit to make this movie work.  And good for him.  It would be tonally inappropriate if he went full Goldblum on the movie.  But he's also incredibly charming for a sociopath.  Like, maybe people wouldn't make the connection that Trump is a fascist with this performance. Again, the point of allegory is to get people to listen to you, so we have to allow these choices.

Now, I'm dancing (through life) around the core characters of the movie.  I am slightly afraid that Cynthia Erivo is going to read this somehow.  I mean, I doubt it, but I'm sure that she's getting the Google alerts based on what the Internet is telling me.  She's freaking fantastic in this movie.  She's so good (and this is not meant to be slander) that I actually have a harder time picturing Idina Menzel in the same role.  But to that note, am I now an Ariana Grande fan?  Now, I don't love that she's dating someone who was married from this movie.  That's probably not too great.  But  I have to give so many points to Grande for making this role simultaneously her own and with a nice nod to Kristen Chenowith's performance.  I mean, the big win is that it is Grande's character to play.  While there are nods to Chenowith's performance, Grande destroys here.  Absolutely destroys.

Also, if you ever want to explain the difference between "Not racist" and "Anti-Racist", look at Wicked as a movie.  While I like a lot of the movie, I adore "Defying Gravity."  I know.  I know.  People have been making memes about "Holding space for 'Defying Gravity'".  Do you know why you should?  Because that part is absolutely perfect and it fixes a lot of the problems I had with the stage production.  Guys, I have a theatre degree.  I get that theatre does some things so much better than movies.  But Defying Gravity is about taking back power and Chu makes Elphaba powerful as heck in this movie.  That entire sequence, stretched out, works so much better.  She's scary and amazing and I love it so much.

But this is where I have to let you down a little bit.  There was all this hype for Wicked.  And I'll be honest...I don't get it.  I love the political message.  It is a completely functional musical by a guy who completely destroyed it with In the Heights.  But in terms of "Will this make me cry?"  Not at all.  I don't get why everyone was shedding massive amounts of tears for this movie.  If anything, a lot of the musical numbers felt a bit reined in.  That's unfair.  I don't know.  Maybe because Wicked is more of a traditional musical than I care for, there were a bunch of moments that felt restrained.  It's not that they weren't impressive.  It's just that they didn't blow the doors off of the place when they were performed.  Everything felt a bit more safe and less innovative.  Sure, I loved the spinning library.  That was a fun dance number.  But in terms of face-melting dancing?  I don't know.  Maybe it's because The Wizarding World of Harry Potter doesn't do much for me, so Wizard, which seems to share an aesthetic, doesn't do much for me either.

But it's good.  I'm jazzed to see the second one.  I've had the soundtrack stuck in my head, which is a bummer because I was digging Chappel Roan for the time that she invaded that headspace.  Is it as amazing as people are making it out to be?  Probably not.  Is it still very good?  Absolutely.