Which One: WICKED

Director Jon M. Chu is a reliable steady hand behind the camera. He simply makes movies that work well with broad audiences. He honed his skills on two Step Up movies and a G.I. Joe effort, an underrated Jem and the Holograms pop musical, a couple Bieber concert docs, and an adaptation of rom-com novel Crazy Rich Asians. That he’s not strictly a big-budget franchise player allowed him to develop some skill with bodies in motion and human-scaled emotion. He clearly has an old-fashioned love of blocking and staging, but enough modern facility with digital embellishments to give it a contemporary unreality. Those efforts are often pretty appealing. But all of that made him especially situated to modulate his modes of filmmaking into adapting Broadway hits. They bring his skill to life in even more vibrant, earnest ways with clear passion for the material and the genre. These bottle up some extra passion in the sturdy professional polish. His version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights has a great sense of place and mood in a heightened block party appeal. Its best moments have a kind of rolling crescendo of dance and high spirits. That movie, about thwarted and kindled hopes and dreams for family and friends and careers and romances, has such a joyful expression of character and community that it’s hard to resist. It’s a mode to which his career’s been building.

And now Chu turns his attention to the biggest musical of the past couple decades: Wicked. It’s also his best movie yet. This is a big-hearted, well-crafted, crowd-pleasing spectacle of music, dance, humor, and pathos. He marries a potentially large canvas of a fantasy musical with something grounded in a simple character story of two women who grow to respect one another before getting torn apart by circumstance and politics and personalities. This Part 1 tackles just the first Act of this well-known reinterpretation of the Wicked Witch of the West and finds enough material for a full, satisfying experience in and of itself. Turns out it’s a great time to revive Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz’s production in which young women experience prejudice, creeping fascism, and dawning political consciousness. That it is in the guise of Wizard of Oz fan fiction gives it a fantastical frisson, even as Chu deliberately steers away from the perfectly outlandish artifice of the 1939 classic inspiration and into something a little softer and more inflected with a rounded-edges pseudo-reality. It’s a little silly, and a little synthetic, but it’s such a wondrously big-hearted experience that believes in itself so fully that it’s easy to get pulled along. The proceedings take place in enormous sets—fake forests, palaces and schoolyards that are lush prosceniums ornately decorated—and find figures in costumes lavishly detailed in jewels and frills and flowing angles. There are some phony computer-generated animals and the usual over-cranked background enhancements movies of this size get these days. But throughout there’s a spirt of the stage to its staging, and even some Disney Renaissance to its wrangling of small crowds, big reactions, and lovely gestures—like skipping across a pond on a row of stones. (This is what all those dire live-action remakes wish they felt like.) It’s comfortably old-fashioned underneath its new-film shine.

Amid all this design, we meet the emerald-green Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) as she arrives at the magical Shiz University. Her reluctant roommate is privileged blonde striver Glinda, who’ll one day be The Good Witch. She’s played by Ariana Grande in a sensational flouncy performance in which each line reading is deeply motived with both dramatic tensions and comic filigrees, sometimes in the same expression. Those choices flow out of her characterization and into song with a dazzling fluidity. It’d be a star making turn if she wasn’t already a pop star. It’s a performance built to contrast and support the striking stillness and deliberateness from Erivo as a deeply wounded outcast who slowly starts to imagine herself fitting into the mainstream only to be pushed back by said mainstream's callousness toward the marginalized. It’s a tricky role played for vulnerably and toughness, a self-actualization in the face of others assumptions about her used to manipulate and deceive until she takes command of her own power. This tension is embodied in the character conflicts—and then expressed through a fine ensemble of good performers as interesting characters who stir the pot, and inevitably join them in song and dance. Chu shoots these numbers with attention to choreography and finds neatly complicated and rousing ways to stage them, and draw them out with a uniquely cinematic form of theatricality. It’s feels all so casual and effortless as crowds move in sync or drift into moving solos—ballads both tenderly downbeat and triumphantly bellowed. As all good musicals do, these numbers spring out of deep wells of emotion mere dialogue is suddenly inadequate to express. It makes for a full and transporting experience if you give yourself over to it—and ends on such a perfect high that a 12-month intermission seems almost bearable.