Wicked

The most indulgent film of the year

I don’t cry about real things but I am apt to embarrass myself in movie theatres. It’s not so much the sad things as the overwhelmingly epic things. I just get this feeling like -oh my God humans made this incredible thing- and then I’m just a blubbery mess. So, when I tell you that from the opening chords of “No One Mourns the Wicked” I was not OK, you can get a good idea of how I felt about Wicked.

Wicked is here to overwhelm you. It is dialed to 400 at every moment; I found myself mentally grabbing at some sort of constant safe normal thing to stay sane but the best I could do was Glinda’s cute little 1940s secretary outfits. Wicked was overwhelming when I saw it on Broadway in the mid-2000s, but this is just… more. It reminded me of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter at times, mainly for its sincerity, but it also reminded me of the way it felt to watch a Transformers movie: loud, strangely beautiful, over-the-top, mayhemic, surreal. Above all, it is indulgent. Self-indulgent, for sure, but it is as interested in indulging you as it is in indulging itself.

Wicked has been in the process of becoming a movie for a long time. It’s an incredibly successful property with a rabid fanbase, although not necessarily easy to adapt. This adaptation, although long in gestation, benefited from taking its time. It is perfectly cast and it sounds fantastic. Ariana Grande is maybe… one of the most talented comic actresses of her generation? I came out of it wondering if she’s actually been wasting her time as a pop star. She should do much more of this exact type of thing because she’s phenomenal at it. Cynthia Erivo has been phenomenal for a long time, but she’s going to get a lot more public recognition for it now. Jonathan Bailey is already Bridgerton famous but he’s also somehow our generation’s Gene Kelly, something I did not know going in. The acting overall feels very Old Hollywood, which connects the disparate threads of this story neatly.

This movie is epic enough that it feels almost silly to say that it is “good.” It is too big to fail; it was marketed to me so aggressively that I felt like I was almost crying uncle when I finally bought my ticket. There were Wicked ads on screens above the pineapples at my Whole Foods; I was basically compelled into the theatre. I can’t even begin to guess what they need to make to break even, but I firmly believe this movie will make a billion dollars. When we’re working with that kind of money, even the parts that don’t work are indulged, both by us and by the filmmakers themselves.

I forgot a lot of things about Wicked over the years, principal among them the entire reason for Elphaba to defy gravity in the first place. The main conflict in this story revolves around the mistreatment of talking animals and, in my opinion, it has never worked. The songs related to this section of the story are the weakest and the logic of the show gets shakier the longer you think about it. You are required to accept extreme pathos from a talking goat and though the film does as good a job as it can with all this, it still feels like it belongs in a different story. Because “Defying Gravity” is such an epic, iconic song it feels sort of empty to remember that the moment comes out of Elphaba’s rage at having been tricked into giving monkeys wings. That’s not to say that animal rights are not an important thing to care about, but from a story perspective, it is a misstep to spend two hours developing the relationships between the main characters and then make the central conflict of the film be caused by people we’ve just met and mostly anonymous animals we’ve barely seen or been taught to care about. I also have quibbles with the scene itself, which is stretched to the breaking point in this adaptation, frequently cutting away in the middle of the song to remind us about plot points or characters we don’t need to be reminded of at this moment. It is the height of self-indulgence in a self-indulgent film and I came out of it exhilarated but also with that feeling you get when you eat an entire banana split by yourself.

I think that’s why I didn’t feel that much towards the characters themselves in this movie. I felt wonder and joy at the performances, but all of my reactions were filtered through the lens of these as performances. It is not a criticism of her skills at all, but I always saw Glinda as Ariana Grande first and my reactions to her story were first about how good she was in the role, with actual emotions related to her character a distant second. This movie is a spectacle, more circus than story. Its emotions are painted in broad strokes and its quieter moments (“I’m Not That Girl”) can’t quite come down from the heights fast enough to land. But I don’t really mind any of that. Wicked lives in those heights; to call it operatic is an understatement and it knows that. It wants to be that and I think it’s important to judge a work of art on what it intends to be as much as what it is. Every second of Wicked is intentional and it wildly succeeds at its goals.

I have no idea what to expect from part 2; I don’t really remember what happens in the second half of this story. I certainly don’t remember what songs are in that half, beyond my 2009 high school graduation song, “For Good.” But I know what to expect in terms of vibes; Wicked is a juggernaut now, a powerful brand far more than a story. I predict we will all overdose on Wicked in 2025; it will make a huge Oscars push; it will show up in Halloween costumes and spinoffs and toys and singalongs and God knows what else. I worry a bit we will be sick of it by the time part 2 rolls around, hyped up so high and so expensive that there’s no way it can live up to its own hype machine. But I will never forget what it felt like to watch this movie. It felt the way Titanic did, the way Return of the King did, the way Deathly Hallows did. In the words of Harry Styles, it felt like a movie.