Review: Erivo and Grande can’t save "Wicked: For Good"

by Cláudio Alves

Months before it arrived on Broadway, when it first opened for previews in San Francisco, Wicked was already being criticized for an act-two problem. Some finagling was made on the trip to the East Coast, yet the show that premiered at the Gershwin in October 2003 suffered from many of the same structural issues. They didn't stop it from becoming a commercial success or a cultural phenomenon, but still. Two decades later, the revisionist tale of the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good was announced as being split into two movies, alarming those who were familiar with the show and its problems. Financial incentives aside, the decision allowed the first act to soar higher than it would were it still chained to an unsatisfying conclusion, but it left the second part unmoored. Bloating the runtime to double what it is on stage and transmuting a 15-minute act break into a year-long wait didn't help either.

This is not to say that Wicked: For Good was fated to fail, simply that it faced bigger obstacles to success than its predecessor. Sadly, Jon M. Chu and company weren't up to the challenge, no matter how hard the dream team of Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande tried...

As someone who liked but did not love the 2024 Wicked movie, I was cautiously optimistic regarding its sequel. For Good was quick to dispel my highest hopes, however. Rather than leading directly into "Thank Goodness" as the stage musical does, Chu and the Holzman/Fox screenwriting duo devised an action sequence as our reintroduction to Oz, showing Elphaba sabotaging the construction of the yellow brick road in what could be a wink to Gregory Maguire's novel and its descriptions of resistance through infrastructure attacks and terrorism. Right away, it becomes apparent that turning the show cinematic continues to entail an appeal to fantasy epic tonalities. 

More concerningly, it further reveals an unwillingness to embrace the inherent artifice and silliness that's been baked into the material ever since Judy Garland stepped into a Technicolor Munchkinland or when Baum's own Dorothy did the same on the page. There's been a slight increase in color saturation, perhaps as a post-production response to the critiques of the first movie, but Alice Brooks' lensing remains a bleak affair and the overall direction follows suit. Nevertheless, there's a fierceness to Erivo's entrance that ought to buy the movie some grace, her precise mix of emotional earnestness and theatrical stylization on full display. 

There's not much time to ponder Elphaba's state of mind, though, since now it's time for "Thank Goodness" to welcome us into the fascistic pageantry of Oz and the movie's other protagonist… or not. Remember how Chu was so keen on breaking "Popular" and "Defying Gravity" into pieces? All that dialogue and arrhythmic pauses, interstitial bits of business that cracked open those scenes' crescendo-like constructions? Well, he's back at it again, splintering Act Two's opening song into what are essentially three different numbers whose propulsion has been undercut by a hiccupping array of stops and starts.

"Every Day More Wicked" is fun enough, a skewed recap of Act One that accounts for the year-long pause between the movies. The callbacks to some of the first chapter's most viral moments, visual gags, and choreographies scream of reshoot panic, but they are the sort of fan service one is all too willing to accept from a big-budget Hollywood circus. Yet the cracks are already showing, including the strain in Michelle Yeoh's voice as she tries to sing the Morrible parts of the song and fails so miserably it may give the actress' fans second-hand embarrassment. Her non-musical passages aren't much better, though there are some nice comedic beats with the Good Witch.

By the time we've gotten through the bulk of extraneous stuff and arrived at Ariana Grande's much-ballyhooed rendition of Glinda's "I Couldn't Be Happier" sung soliloquy, whatever generosity still existed for Chu's directorial approach vanishes into thin air. The actress turned pop princess turned Oscar-nominated thespian is giving it her all, opting for a more introspective take on the lyrics that eschews the propagandist extravagance with which Kristin Chenoweth and Megan Hilty colored their Glindas. To further this point, Chu takes a cue from Rob Marshall's treatment of Cinderella in Into the Woods, staging the meat of the song as an internal monologue, unraveling while time is frozen.

The issue lies in how poorly this is communicated, as if there's a schism between the overall vision for how the scene should play out and the camera's mediation. In other words, the design is there, the suspended time effects are there, Grande's performance is there and as miraculous as it was in part one, but basic filmmaking cogency and grammar have done like Elvis and left the building (I could not believe my eyes with a couple of continuity errors). Honestly, this review could be nothing but a string of such observations. "No Good Deed" feels oddly static despite a frantic camera, enacted as if toward a proscenium even when Chu shapeshifts the scene into an immersive flashback mess.

"The Girl in the Bubble" is all about the literal-minded flourish of the camera going in and out of mirrors to the point of self-parody, and "As Long As You're Mine" lacks the juice, drained of formal excitement or whatever jolt of cinematic eroticism despite how much the actors keep doing their best to sell the sensuality (and some pleasant comedy in Bailey's case). "Wonderful" is overextended and arrhythmic and lacking in some crucial spatial awareness, adding Glinda to the mix so that it can have some dramatic purpose and hide Jeff Goldblum's lack of singing skills. But I guess this text will become even duller than these directorial choices if I go on. 

So, let's try to look at the big picture and what these issues reveal about Wicked: For Good. Mostly, and "Thank Goodness" is a particularly good example, they evidence how much the film feels both rushed and stretched thin, a bizarre state of affairs whose paradox is hard to resolve. Alas, this was already the reality of the show, and there are various changes that do help the whole thing flow smoother than it did on stage. Consider the larger investment in the principals' characterizations, Glinda above all others. That said, other characters feel diminished by undiscernible motivations – Morrible – or like add-ons that are only there to guide us into the Wizard of Oz and fulfill that mechanical narrative obligation – Nessa and Boq. 

Oh, yeah, the pesky IP connection is a nuisance, alright. Following Dorothy's journey would feel like a betrayal of the musical's design, but replicating the odd off-screen stylings of Joe Mantello's original stage direction doesn't work either. Every cut to the Kansas girl, face hidden by distance or POV angle, seems like a visual gag, but by this point in the story, humor has given way to full-on tragedy. The tone is erratic and mismatched, and hits another strange contrast between For Good and last year's screen spectacle. In comparison, the second film feels small and lonely, the gesturing at an epic's scope only exacerbating the sense of isolation.

Which, in some ways, works as a reflection of exactly where Glinda and Elphaba are in their lives. But what makes sense at the level of character drama does not necessarily function as the primary tone for a blockbuster musical, resulting in another tense contradiction at the heart of a movie that doesn't know what to do with it. This is especially sad because there comes a moment, late in the tale, when being overwhelmed by that visceral solitude suddenly hits right where it should, demanding tears from the audience and earning them, for once. If only Chu had conceived of it as a culmination rather than more of the same, a redundancy after so many other passages exulted the same idea.

I'm referring to the song that gives Wicked: For Good its title, considered by many to be the second act's highlight and a symmetrical echo to "Defying Gravity." Reader, it made me cry, which no other rendition of "For Good" had ever accomplished, beautiful as I might have found them. And that is a testament to the welcome simplicity and unobtrusive choices with which Chu frames the duet. More so, it's a reminder that Grande and Erivo are simply perfect as Glinda and Elphaba, their bond so strong and intimately believable that it pummels through the textual troubles to deliver an emotional wallop whose sheer force is hard to put into words. 

That's as true here, the climactic musical farewell of the two friends, as it is in the rest of the movie. Grande has the benefit of an expanded arc that deepened what we see of Glinda on stage, and she sinks her teeth into it like any performer worth her salt, taking full advantage of the opportunity to deliver a tour de force. The sharp comedic instincts of the first movie are still present, but they quickly give way to a more melodramatic approach that's just as reminiscent of Old Hollywood stars as her earlier frothiness. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll recoil at the ease of selfishness and find yourself cheering when that impulse is overcome and true goodness prevails.

Also, Gelphie defenders rejoice because, whatever the script may state, Grande is playing the Good Witch as a woman in viridescent love. But of course, great as this take on Glinda is, it could only come to pass in synergy with Erivo's Elphaba, who takes a step back in terms of narrative relevance but nonetheless delivers an inspired performance. I've already mentioned her balance of earnestness and theatricality, though it bears repeating how much the actress manages to excavate the complexities of her character while leaving space for iconographic impact as a figure that was once the archetypal form of pure evil on screen.

She doesn't quite suggest a woman that could, given the chance, morph into Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch in the same way someone like Julia Murney did. Yet, that's part of what makes her interpretation unique and worthwhile - a foregrounding of plaintiveness even when everything about a scene indicates that flat fury would be the way to go, a genuine glimmer of belief at the end of "Wonderful," a softness to Elphaba's catfight antics with Glinda after her sister's death. In the end, Erivo doesn't so much explode as she collapses into herself, rendering the green witch a shining star full of potential slowly transformed, by circumstance and external manipulation, into a black hole, cannibalistic grief taking the place of a gravitational pull.

These actresses and their performances are so extraordinary that they survive Chu's oft-misguided direction, the sound mix that crushes their vocals, even the busy design – which is better than in the first movie, in part, because it's been pared down, including Grande's wardrobe consisting of variations of only four dresses. They survive the murky politics whose conclusions are, at best, infantile and, at worst, dangerous in their dictums that systemic ills can be solved by changing one singular person in power. They survive the dubious racial dynamics that see a literal and symbolic minority agree to be vilified and exiled for a greater good that necessitates the preservation of the status quo with just a few tweaks.

Still, though they might survive this dreck with their dignity unscathed, their achievement still worthy of plaudits and much applause, neither Erivo nor Grande can save Wicked: For Good. I suppose a fan that comes to this movie looking for emotional resonance above all else, who wants to be moved and doesn't care so much for cinematic form, might come out of it fully satisfied. But I'm not that person and this is the review of a film, not just a couple of character arcs in isolation, nor two magisterial performances out of context. At best, the stars of Wicked: For Good provide a lifeboat to keep the audience afloat as the mega musical sinks. Down it goes, into the abyss, defying gravity no more.

Wicked: For Good opens tonight, a wide release ready to dominate the late November box office.