Wicked: For Good finishes the story of two young witches who met in their witchcraft school days at Shiz university, and post-graduately struggle for the soul of the Emerald City of Oz in Munchkinland. Two hours, 18 minutes for Wicked: For Good--all in four hours. 58 minutes for both films, with the first part grossing ¾ $billion worldwide since its launch last Thanksgiving. Our film critic, Harlan Jacobson has a colorful review.
HJ: Wicked won Oscars for production design and costumes, which is what it should have won out of its 10 nominations last year that included picture and performances by the two witches, Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda, at the heart of what is the backstory of our great beloved American classic, The 1939 Wizard of Oz. This limited two-parter’s singular achievement is director John Chu’s wrangling both the longstanding Broadway musical and Gregory Maguire’s novel onto the screen as a lemon drop, behind-the-scenes look at what was really going on in Emerald City when Dorothy from Kansas blew into town and smushed the Wicked Witch of the East.
The Winnie Holzman, Dana Fox screenplay rewrite of the original Wicked Witch of the West, Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba, is what this whole project is all about. She’s green, meaning of color, and by story design the only one gifted with talent and a compassionate heart seeking justice. The world has worked out for Glinda, not so much for the green Elphaba. The two are best friends and adversaries since Shiz, the Witchcraft academy where Glinda was popular and Elphaba had talent in a class full of dullards who presumably could pay tuition. In Wicked: For Good, the grown-up Elphaba has shown up at the Emerald City to take down Jeff Goldblum’s update on Frank Morgan’s original Wizard, this time as a bumbling frontman for a creeping tyranny that Glinda sees but serves loyally.
That’s even after Madame Morrible, the former Chinese head of school and now the Wizard’s Goebbels, has rebranded Elphaba, her former whizbang witch student, as the grownup Wicked Witch of the West. The Palo Alto born director, John Chu, son of immigrant Chinese parents, a father from the mainland and Taiwanese mother, broke through in 2018 with Crazy Rich Asians, and seems to have a feel for the steely glare of disapproving Chinese women. That the Asian is revealed as the real menace in the story… Well, the best you can say is that at least this is a story about women, and the men are useless.
There’s nothing as breathtaking as the green train that pulled into the station to carry Elphaba off to Oz in the first part, all of it wrought by the FX team led by Pablo Helman. Wicked: For Good is still more of cinematographer Alice Brooks’ light show framing Nathan Crowley’s gorgeous production design and Paul Tazewell’s costumes than it is a memorable musical. This despite the dizzying octaves of Ariana Grande and vocal shockwave of Erivo, whose end duet, For Good, is moving in the moment. But I’d be surprised if it generates much revenue for composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz in better motel Karaoke bars everywhere. Schwartz’ songs serve the moment, but there is no one breakout song in this second film -- no Don’t Cry for Me Argentina in Evita, What I Did for Love in A Chorus Line, or Memory in Cats. But this is For Good, and it’s good enough.
"For Good", the song, at its heart gives voice to the rocky but deep friendship between these two girls-to-young women. But pulling back, the deep impulse of this story is the desire of a goodhearted white liberal to change the fortunes of and nullify the threat of a more talented, justice seeking girl (and later young woman) of color who’s tuned into the authoritarianism of a place that looks like Candyland. In film cycles, this film’s green witch Elphaba is the granddaughter of most of the roles played by Sidney Poitier in the Stanley Kramer civil rights films of the 1950s and 60s -- chained to a white Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones, same idea; the game changing guest in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, same idea; and the “They Call Me Mr. Tibbs” Philly Cop who ends up in a very white Mississippi Town in Norman Jewison’s In The Heat of The Night. Again, same idea.
Oz is still a sweet town, Bowen Yang every so often camps his way across the screen, Jonathan Bailey from Bridgerton in one curious bit is reduced after a beatdown as Fiyero, the beautiful captain of the guard, to looking like a waffle who cheers up Elphaba, feeling blue about looking green, and it all still charms kids. In the good tradition of the last decades of kid films, the adults will see the 1939 layer being played with—from the completely minor details, say when the Cowardly Lion, voiced here by Colman Domingo, appearing in the Emerald City with the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Dorothy in front of Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard, clutches his tail exactly the way Bert Lahr did 86 years ago. This layering extends all the way up to what really happened when the original Wicked Witch, Margaret Hamilton, melted away at the end, doused by a bucket of water--a fate awaiting Erivo’s witch here, just given a tweak.
The original novel in 1900 was about pluck, pluck was in the air—Teddy Roosevelt would become president in 1901, and the novel’s Dorothy caught the can-do spirit of what TR would come to symbolize as the dawning of the American century. A runaway bestseller at the time, the book and later the 1939 film were both candy-colored wishes. The ’39 film was also about pluck but in a world that felt as if it had no future. Wicked: For Good up-ends our understanding of the characters in Baum’s original story. It rewrites and sidelines them as characters pursuing tourist objectives in a city that had its own drama—something we never much thought about when watching the annual replay of The Wizard of Oz on network TV.
At the core of this two-part Wicked and Wicked For Good is a liberal vision about race, or more exactly skin color. On the surface Ariana Grande’s Glinda, the Good Witch, is a cherry vanilla cheerleader, or make that Emerald City Influencer, who lacks witchcraft but has a good heart and oodles of political charm for Munchkins. Underneath the Wicked project is the story of a change agent, Elphaba, invited in and opting out. Can’t be more up to the minute than that.
You can hear Doug Doyle's The Art of the Story with Jeff Goldblum here.