Wicked Review: The Witches Rock!

At 160 minutes, Wicked is too long, and knowing the undercurrents running through the plot, the candyfloss cheeriness gets too much after a point.
Still, it is a worthwhile page-to-stage-to screen journey, observes Deepa Gahlot.

Before movie franchises started creating their own mythology, L Frank Baum had done it in 1900 with his Oz series of books, the most famous and most adapted being The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz.

The books were hugely popular and in 1939, it was filmed as the Wizard Of Oz, with Judy Garland in the role of Dorothy, who travels from rural Kansas to the mythical Oz.

In 1995, Gregory Maguire wrote the novel Wicked: The Life and Times of The Wicked Witch of the West, making Baum's scary, green-skinned witch the focus of his novel and humanising her. This was turned into a Broadway musical, Wicked, in 2003, and has been running since then.

The stage production with music by Stephen Schwartz and book by Winnie Holzman, is the basis of the two-part movie, directed by John M Chu.

On the surface, it is the story about fitting in, about obsession with perfect beauty, about friendship and love, but it also has some subversive political content about the discrimination against minorities, government tyranny and misuse of power.

In the Wicked story, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) -- the name uses L Frank Baum's initials -- was born with green skin, due to her mother's affair with a stranger.

She was immediately shunned by her father, Governor Thropp (Andy Nyman), and tormented by other kids.

She discovers her magical powers early in life, like being able to levitate stones with her mind and flinging them at jeering boys. But she does not know how to control or channel the emotions that bring on the magic.

She remains the friendless freak till she travels to Shiz, the school her wheelchair-bound sister Nessa (Marissa Bode ) is to join.

Later to become The Good Witch, Galinda or Glinda (Ariana Grande), the classic, vain, blonde, entitled beauty, arrives at the same time, in a Barbie parody of pink suitcases, pink dresses and has a pink suite allotted specially for her.

The school's sorcery teacher Miss Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) gets a demonstration of what Elphaba's rage can do -- things fly and crumble when she is mocked by the students -- and insists on taking her under her wing.

Glinda, who wants to learn sorcery, is scornfully rejected. Much against her wishes, Glinda is forced to share a room with Elphaba and treats her with utter contempt.

It is not till the arrival of the 'callow and shallow' Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) that things happen so that Elphaba and Glinda become friends.

Glinda, confident in her beauty and allure, sets her eye on the prince right away. He has already met Elphaba in the forest, and far from being put off by her green skin, he is attracted to her defiant personality.

Meanwhile, Elphaba, who was raised by a bear nanny, has discovered that in the land, ruled by the supposedly benevolent Wizard (Jeff Goldblum), the talking animal professors are being harassed, removed from their positions in Shiz and losing their ability to speak.

When history professor Dillamond (voiced by Peter Dinklage) is taunted with Nazi-like graffiti, he has to quit too.

Elphaba turns into a sympathiser, learning the truth about the Wizard she admired from afar, while Glinda bats her eyelids and twirls around the prince.

The messages in Wicked are so obvious that they could be flashing in neon -- mainly that everybody should be accepted despite their diversity and nobody is born wicked, they are forced to react to how others treat them.

However, fans of the musical built over two decades are enamored of the lavish song and dance numbers that Chu has filmed with joyous flair on the sets of Oz, Shiz and Munchkinland, created with a pleasing aesthetic extravagance.

That foot-stomping Dancing Through Life sequence set in the school library is a delight, along with numbers like Popular and Defying Gravity.

How Elphaba acquires the pointy, black cape and broomstick that have become the signs of the Halloween witch, how she and Glinda become Wicked and Good Witches is in there, and more is to come in the Part 2 scheduled for November 2025. (The origins of Dorothy's friends, Tinman, Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion are revealed too.)

At 160 minutes, the film is too long, and knowing the undercurrents running through the plot, the candyfloss cheeriness gets too much after a point.

Still, it is a worthwhile page-to-stage-to screen journey, made watchable by the wonderful performances by all the actors, Cynthia Arivo and Ariana Grande, above all.