Surely, the very last thing the world needs right now is another “Wicked” article.
But, alas, I’m on a quest in this column here to view and review every major award contender and likely Best Picture Oscar nominee for the 2025 awards season, and even before 2024 has ended, “Wicked” has already done a lot more than contend.
It’s a lock for a Best Picture nod at the Academy Awards. That’s a given. So the only questions worth asking now are “Is it good?” and “Does it deserve the hype?”
In case you’ve been living under a rock – or under a house that fell out of the sky – “Wicked” is a massive-scale, spectacle-heavy musical recounting the life story of the Wicked Witch of the West long before “The Wizard of Oz.” It’s based on the 2003 Broadway breakout that was itself based on a novel from the 90s.
The witch (retroactively named Elphaba) is inexplicably born with green skin, leading to a lifetime of exclusion, marginalization, and hatred.
When her unrefined magical potential lands her in college, she meets, spars with and eventually befriends Galinda (later to become Glinda, “the good witch”) and together they grow to uncover the dark, repressed secret truth of Oz and its famous Wizard.
It’s a story and a film all about representation in many of the best and most important ways, featuring perspectives on race, disability, privilege, and fascist scapegoating far more pointed than we’re used to seeing from any big Hollywood production.
There’s a lot more to the “Wicked” story, but that’s where this film ends, because, at two hours and forty minutes, this movie is only “Part 1,” with the second half to be released likely this time next year.
Before anything else – and honestly probably above all else – it should be said that co-leads Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are both phenomenal, and every one of the film’s best moments are the quiet, smaller, intimate scenes they share.
The heights of their untouchable vocal talents are no real surprise, but the heartfelt believability of their performances (even when going big,) and the comfort with which they each carry their character, is almost definitely the most impressive thing in an overall very impressive film.
The same can be said of the costuming and production design.
The Oz of “Wicked” is an unrelentingly gorgeous and visually rich world, built largely on practical sets and conceived with layers and history beneath its wild architecture and eye-popping vivid colorations.
And it’s that massive scale – that sheer bigness – that not only defines this blockbuster but also seems to have fueled much of the unhinged fandom around it. Everything is big in this movie, from the emotions to the sets to the hairstyling to the choreography and each and every belted-to-the-rafters musical number.
It’s only logical, then, that the response from fans would be equally big. This is, after all, perhaps the most “musical” musical ever made, a theatre-kid fever dream and maybe the final thesis of all things “theatrical.”
It takes a children’s story and its family film musical adaptation and raises it to the heights of Wagnerian opera, so yeah, the fandom is bound to be a bit over-the-top.
But the single biggest thing here is, frankly, the runtime.
I’m on record many times over expressing my love for long films and epic storytelling, but it’s difficult to shake the feeling that this one is just unnecessarily inflated.
In adapting only the first half of the stage musical, this “Part 1” is actually ten minutes longer than the entire Broadway show.
It’s already pretty tough to justify such an expansion of a story that’s already been so successfully told at a shorter length, but committing so fully to expanding and inflating the plot in a musical like this only really serves to lengthen the time between musical numbers. So it feels more jarring than usual when the characters finally do break out in song.
And those songs sometimes feel needlessly inflated themselves.
The big (and I mean BIG) finale here is all built around showstopper “Defying Gravity,” easily the show’s most famous and enduring number.
It’s rousing and beautifully melodic and inarguably powerful in Erivo’s voice and it all comes so close to sticking the landing. But then it keeps going another three or four or five minutes and feels like it’s just drawing itself out with deeply unnecessary “American Idol”- style vocal runs.
So is it good? Yes. The technical skills, performing talents, and straight-up commitment and love that made this film are all undeniable, and no matter your gripes or preferences, it’s definitely good.
Does it deserve the hype? Well, that depends. If you’re a musical-devouring theatre kid that’s waited your entire life for something to finally capture the sheer magic and transcendent emotional scope of the best and biggest stage productions, then yes. This is unequivocally the movie you’ve been waiting for.
If you’ve been wanting a huge Hollywood film to bluntly and consciously confront issues of race and disability representation, then yes, this movie is going to fill your heart and feel vital and culturally crucial in a way rarely felt.
But it’s not going to resonate with everyone, and its inflated size, its over-the-top tone, and its willful disregard of anything like completion or resolution, I think, is likely to hurt its chances for Best Picture gold.
Suffice it to say, if you’re not a fan of fantasy, and most importantly if you’re not a fan of musicals, then don’t be swayed and intrigued by the hype.
“Wicked: Part 1” is not the movie to make you love musicals. This is purely a film for musical theatre fanatics by musical theatre fanatics.
So you can maybe understand why the response has been…fanatical.
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Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.