My last year’s review of “Wicked” began with the notion that the film would have been much better if someone didn’t make the decision to split act one and act two of the 2003 Broadway musical into two separate movies (apparently, this idea might have stemmed from Craig Mazin?).
Now that the second film, “Wicked: For Good” (a roughly hour-long act stretched into a two-hour-and-17-minute movie), has come out, I feel I can firmly say that I think I was right. But that certainly doesn’t make me feel any better.
“Wicked: For Good” (directed by Jon M. Chu and co-written by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox), picks up where the first film left off. Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) is now the Wicked Witch of the West, trying to prove to everyone that the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) is a non-magical fraud only interested in oppressing and subjugating the talking animals that live in Oz. Her former best friend Glinda (Ariana Grande) has taken the easier route, content to be the spokesperson for the Wizard as she tries to soothe everyone’s fears and keep them happy.
The two friends find themselves diametrically opposed, yet yearning for each other at the same time. And things are starting to spiral out of control. Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), Glinda’s fiancé, is desperately in love with Elphaba. Circumstances for the animals are getting worse by the minute – the film opens with a shot of oxen-like creatures building the yellow brick road under threat of a whip. And a little girl named Dorothy Gale is about to fall out of the sky and make everything that much more complicated.
I can’t say that “Wicked: For Good” doesn’t have its moments. Grande once again proves that she’s very well suited to this role (although I have some questions about the way Glinda is positioned in the film), and I did giggle and kick my feet while watching Jonathan Bailey sing “As Long as You’re Mine” (I am a red-blooded American woman, what can I say?). But, outside of those few moments, “Wicked: For Good” feels immensely slow and ill-conceived.
The first film ends with the musical’s most famous song, “Defying Gravity.” This should feel like a slam dunk, and vocally, Erivo knocks it out of the park. But the sequence adds multiple breaks in the action (AKA, the singing), robbing the song of its propulsion.
In hindsight, these pacing problems might have been a warning. From a musical filmmaking standpoint, “Wicked: For Good” falls far behind the first movie. In “Wicked,” Chu demonstrated a competent visual musical ability, particularly with lighter numbers like “Popular” or dance numbers like “Dancing Through Life.” But in “Wicked: For Good” he struggles to find interesting ways to showcase any of the second act songs, losing that ability without the crutch of a ton of choreography to lean on. Instead, we get performers who don’t have much physical space to inhabit, either standing in one place or wandering (or flying) around the set until they inevitably end up wherever their next mark is.
The meandering quality of the musical numbers drags the pace down immensely. The biggest offenders here are two new songs written by original composer Stephen Schwartz, “No Place Like Home” and “The Girl in the Bubble. They don’t sound much better than their titles suggest. But even original Broadway numbers suffer. “Wonderful,” which is sung by the Wizard and Glinda as they try to convince Elphaba to join them, is one of the only numbers in the second act that could spotlight a dance. But even here, the filmmaking doesn’t emphasize the movement, the blocking falling flat.
“Wonderful” serves as the crux for many of the film’s problems. Glinda does not appear in this song in the stage show, but joins forces with the Wizard here in the film. It’s possible this was done as a way to allow Grande to sing more (Despite her feeling more like the main character than Elphaba, Glinda doesn’t have that many songs in the second act). But it also alters Glinda’s complicity in a way that the film doesn’t then try to reckon with.
There’s a world where making Glinda more overtly complicit in the Wizard’s fantastical fascist policies might have been interesting, particularly given the fact that the villains in “Wicked: For Good” truly give us nothing. God bless Jeff Goldblum and his bumbling charm, but it genuinely feels like he has no idea what’s going on here, and as Madame Morrible, Michelle Yeoh has the bare minimum to work with.
But even then, Grande’s depiction of Glinda is softer than a lot of her onstage counterparts. That softness works to Grande’s advantage in a lot of ways, but not within this particular context. Onstage, at least in productions I’ve seen, Glinda is a bit more coldly pragmatic in her calculus of what she’s willing to turn a blind eye to. Grande has a little more insecurity to her, more of a people pleaser trying to keep the peace than someone who would try to lure a friend to the dark side.
For as much as the pacing can be a slog and for as many things simply don’t make sense, the calling card of this film, just as it was for the last, is the chemistry between Grande and Erivo. Their vocals are gorgeous, and they portray so much affection for each other on screen, often in ways that pay homage to the queer-coded nature of this story (when Glinda lightly grabs Elphaba’s hand and whispers, “Come with me,” you could cut the sexual tension with a knife). How I wish the film lived up to them.