Play the leitmotifs again; it’s back to Oz. The animals and Munchkins are in exile. We last saw Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba when she swooped off on a newly enchanted broom to the strains of Defying Gravity. Now, in Wicked: For Good, she wanders through the darkened forests, sheltering a herd of talking animals like a cross between Dr Doolittle and Oskar Schindler. “How will you survive here?” asks an incongruously high-pitched bear, in a standard of exposition we must deal with for over two hours. “Nobody in Oz will be happy until you’re dead.” Disloyal friend Glinda (Ariana Grande) has been installed as Oz’s benevolent dictator. She’s gearing herself up to marry Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), who is secretly but unconvincingly in love with Elphaba.
Forget everything you think you know about musicals. The slapstick appeal of the previous instalment has disappeared. This is a 138-minute Dark Night of the Soul. Bits of Holocaust films are mixed in half-heartedly. Families sell each other out. A goat teaches us about scapegoating. Elphaba’s sister Nessarose wickedly governs the East from an Art Nouveau study, surrounded by windows which somehow all face north. (Almost everything in Wicked: For Good faces north, even if it faced south earlier; the beautifully designed Emerald City set stretches limply into a washed-out sky.) Glinda’s an Eva Perón type now but she can’t even get a low-kelvin lightbulb for her dishwater-pink boudoir, which looks suspiciously like a real room from the very first episode of Alan Carr’s Interior Design Masters.
If you tried to make a first-person-shooter video game about the construction industry, it would probably resemble the Elphaba number No Good Deed, which places us above and to the rear of a miniature Cynthia Erivo as she flies between floating debris. We get nicely coloured Ziegfeld theatrics for Wonderful, which tries to explain the backstory of the Wizard; the extended runtime means the other musical numbers melt into each other in a sort of desaturated sludge.
We’re quietly spinning off Victor Fleming’s 1939 The Wizard of Oz here, even though there were eight or nine other films before it. Sometimes we pull back to avoid copyright infringement: Toto is a border terrier and not a Cairn; the Wicked Witch of the East wears different socks. But Dorothy’s blue gingham dress is more or less there, the Yellow Brick Road is the correct colour, and the fin de siècle-cum-Art Deco production design expands admirably on the labours of Metro Goldwyn-Mayer’s art department. Director Jon M Chu understands the popular mythic potential of the nearly 90-year-old film, which is why he follows the stage musical in obscuring Dorothy’s face and sometimes projecting her shadow onto a wall. Any interference with Judy Garland’s image would amount to a desecration.
Our main relief is Ariana Grande, who extends the film beyond its narrative bounds. She made her blockbuster debut last year and is already the world’s only tragic actress. We last witnessed her brand of stardom when Judy Garland was alive, popping pills and binge-drinking and moving masses of gay fans to tears with later-life reprises of Over the Rainbow. It doesn’t matter that this instalment feels rather flat. Grande’s life arches towards it; her participation produces a moral tale more interesting than anything in the script. You’ll get the most out of the film if you imagine her as a medieval saint, clutching her virtues close as she struggles her way to cosmic approbation.
Look in her eyes as she sings new ballad The Girl in the Bubble and the tragedies will bounce off one another: the trials and tribulations of child stardom at shadowy Nickelodeon, the earth-shaking ordeal at Manchester, the untimely death of ex-boyfriend Mac Miller, the unceasing public chat about her dramatic weight loss. All this to get close to God, which means to play Glinda; all that to see your own life play out for the next few decades on theatre stages in cities all around the world. It should be said admiringly: this is exactly how Hollywood used to work.
[Further reading: The masochistic violence of Sisu: Road to Revenge]
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