In Victor Fleming’s “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), Dorothy and the audience are transported from the monochromatic sepia of rural Kansas to the technicolor extravagance of the Land of Oz. The sequence’s stunning audiovisual nature aside, it was the movie’s grand declaration that vivid, saturated hues of technicolor are the future of cinema. So, almost a century later, with the release of the much-anticipated movie, “Wicked” (2024), I can’t help but wonder where it all went wrong.
Adapted from an original Broadway production of the same name, the film is predicated on the burgeoning of an unlikely friendship between Ariana Grande’s charismatically bratty Galinda Upland and Cynthia Erivo’s socially ostracized Elphaba Thropp as they are introduced to Shiz University and the Land of Oz. There’s an unmistakable tactility to the sets — a hand-made quality that appears conceptually labored over instead of digitized with computer-generated slop — but what’s the point of spending tens of millions of dollars on Hollywood blockbuster practicality if you aren’t going to relish in the cinematics?
Its grand nature aside, many of the film’s musical scenes are riddled with visually flat, wholly uninspired lighting. Any time the movie calls for backlighting — and it’s used an awful lot — the neutral, white-balanced light overpowers and practically bleaches out most of the costumes and set design’s color and vibrancy. Think of the “Dancing Through Life” and “Defying Gravity” set pieces: the backlight frustratingly obstructs the actors’ faces and consequently vacates the scenes of their steampunk-driven, fantastical magic. Even in a Dolby setting — a theatrical format that prides itself on projecting a more contrasting image — the movie’s desaturated and contrast-devoid look is nonetheless painfully apparent.
In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Director Jon M. Chu tries to rationalize the movie’s sterile color-grading, saying, “I think what we wanted to do was immerse people into [the Land of] Oz, to make it a real place. Because if it was a fake place, if it was a dream in someone’s mind, then the real relationships and the stakes that these two girls are going through wouldn’t feel real.”
However, when examined, this defense is oh-so-slightly misguided. Cinema has repeatedly proven to audiences that you don’t need to succumb to the drab-gray aesthetics of naturalism to arrest audiences emotionally, to “feel the dirt [and to feel] the wear and tear,” as Chu puts it. Take something akin to “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015), with its brightly-colored palette and its exaggerated, expressionistic visual bombast starkly at odds with the formalistic identity of “Wicked.” Yet, despite its outright absurdism, “Mad Max: Fury Road” wields this off-beat eccentricity to its favor and arrests the viewer to what’s unfolding — something Chu would presumptively consider a dissonant emotional detriment. So, with everything considered, is there anything conceptually that prevents “Wicked” from retaining its emotional core if it veered into emulating something poppy?
Not to mention, the rejection of the vibrant sensibilities of “The Wizard of Oz” comes off as a fundamental misunderstanding of the film’s visual language. Within the movie’s narrative chassis, its aesthetic is a deceptive veneer for the world’s darker underbelly — a tool of illusive misdirection. By comparison, everything in “Wicked” is blunt, hammer-to-the-skull storytelling. Whatever’s subtextual, whether that’s its queerness or its vague critique of fascism, fails to register as anything other than skin-deep.
Frankly, the only semblance of narrative depth comes through the moving sentimentalism of the enemies-to-friends arc between Galinda and Elphaba, spearheaded by two high-powered lead performances. Grande and Erivo’s razor-sharp tonal balance of comedy and melodrama swoon well past their contemporaries, with supporting actors like Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Yeoh falling behind and giving shockingly phoned-in, career-worst performances in comparison. However, for all their gravitas, our leads were simultaneously held back by the decision to extrapolate the first half of “Wicked” into a torturous, criminally long 162-minute runtime. Its momentum consistently stretches itself thin, failing to build any semblance of narrative flow, resulting in junctures that stagnate for what feels like an eternity.
With the 97th Academy Awards around the corner, “Wicked” has its eyes on the prize with a staggering 10 nominations — an undeniable achievement and a rare populist pick for an awards body slowly straying away from the mainstream. If only it were a better movie.
Rating: 5/10
