Feature movie review: WICKED: FOR GOOD

Near the end of Wicked: For Good, we at last get the song that gives this second part of the Broadway musical adaptation its sub-title. It’s a duet that serves as the emotional climax in the relationship between its two principal protagonists, the now-exiled-from-Oz “wicked witch” Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and the tool-of-the-Wizard “good witch” Glinda (Ariana Grande-Butera). The lyrics highlight the impact a profound relationship can have on you—“Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better / But because I knew you / I have been changed for good”—and director Jon M. Chu directs it beautifully, offering reverse cuts in which the actors nail the emotional complexity between these two frenemies. It’s a lovely, tear-jerking scene—all the more notable because it’s one of the few things that’s vaguely recognizable from the source material.

The decision to break Wicked into two parts was always going to be fraught, because it essentially meant figuring out how to turn a two-and-a-half hour theatrical experience into two two-and-a-half hour movies. And the challenge facing the second movie was going to be even more difficult, since nearly every one of the show’s best, catchiest songs was found before intermission. Like the Scarecrow, Wicked: For Good was going to have to be stuffed with additional material just to keep it moving—and it 100 percent feels like it.

That’s a damned shame, because the story about scapegoating, propaganda and deciding whether or not to side with a manipulative regime certainly feels resonant, and clearly has been punched up to emphasize that idea. It’s there in one of the new songs by composer Stephen Schwartz, “No Place Like Home,” in which Elphaba sings “How do I love this place / That’s never loved me,” which accompanies the persecuted animals escaping via a literal underground road. It’s still there in the pointedly cynical lyrics sung by the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) in “Wonderful” about “great man” mythologies. Wicked was always a tale about moral choices and twisting truth for power, and that idea hasn’t been stripped away.

It has, however, been seriously diluted. Filling out the running time involves packing in a lot of CGI busy-ness, from the opening attack by Elphaba on the enslaved-animal-driven construction of the Yellow Brick Road to the stampede of critters disrupting the wedding between Glinda and Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey). Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox add a flashback back-story for Glinda involving her lack of magical talents, intended to make her focus on superficiality more sympathetic, and providing context for the second of the two new songs, “Girl in the Bubble”—a nice opportunity for performance moments for Grande-Butera, but otherwise utterly unnecessary to the character arc. On stage, Wicked’s second act was a ruthlessly efficient integration of familiar elements from The Wizard of Oz driving toward its resolution, even if that meant the songs were mostly narratively functional rather than irresistibly memorable. Wicked: For Good drags out every beat, making its considerably darker tone compared to the first half feel like even more of a slog.

There’s another moment near the end, one that almost exactly echoes the way the stage version presents the famous melting of the Wicked Witch as a shadow-play. The visual restraint of it is striking, in juxtaposition with the way Chu seems determined to make everything else about his Oz as big and gaudy as possible. Financially, it’s undoubtedly going to be a brilliant creative decision to get two Wicked box-office hits out of this story, even if that meant giving audiences a year-long intermission between acts one and two that blunts some of the callbacks in both the dialogue and the relationships. Everything was there in the original musical to make for a single great movie. I can say it wasn’t changed for the better. Because they knew how, it has been changed for greed.