Even so, I can't help but review this from the perspective of a fan of the Broadway show--someone who has been tracking the potential for a film adaptation since before Jon M. Chu's participation was announced for the ambitious undertaking of translating one of Broadway's most electric shows onto film. I can't help but view this from the vantage point of someone who knew just how many opportunities this had to go wrong.
And it's from that vantage point that I now profess such profound relief that the gambit paid off. We truly have the "Lord of the Rings of musicals." I'll give last year's movie the edge for having a slightly better hold on the pacing. But what Jon M. Chu and his team have done here with these two installments is nothing short of extraordinary--in ways I don't know the world will appreciate until they've walked down the yellow brick road some.
We pick up with Elphaba and Glinda some time after they have found themselves on opposite sides of the Wizard's war against the animals. Both of them are following the paths they have chosen for themselves, yet neither of them have really gotten what they wanted. Elphaba's justice quest is having minimal success, and all the parades in the world can't quiet Glinda's unrest. Most of all, they miss one another, and they want to imagine a future where they can find one another again. But as the casualties in the Wizard's tyrannical reign threaten to consume everything, these two friends will have to make unimaginable sacrifices to bring peace back to the place over the rainbow.
Outside observers tend to resign the musical field as a space that just exists for the fireworks and other such pageantries. And this is largely true. The human soul just yearns for spectacle. Some of us get it from seeing spaceships crash into each other. Some of us get it from song and dance.
But the advantage that the musical has over the action-adventure field is that its hold on human imagination has always been both macro and micro. This installment has fewer opportunities for the kaleidoscopic group numbers from the last movie. But in its wake, we see the camera pulling in closer to the face of the performer, peeling away the mask. There's very little of what we'd normally call "choreography" in the love duet between Elphaba and Fiyero, just the constant exchange of charisma between two star players.
And speaking of the film's fantastic cast ... it's very difficult to overstate just what an impossible task Ariana Grande-Butera and Cynthia Erivo were charged with. The rhythms and flourishes of their lines are well rehearsed in the hearts and minds of musical theater fandom. Yet these two girls with their own individual forms of courage and vulnerability make veteran audiences feel like they're discovering this story for the first time, and the reciprocal may also be true.
It's been Chu's gift to musical theater that he's figured out how to apotheosize the source musical--without actually altering anything in its design. Most of what he's done across these two films is reinforce a scene with an added human layer, and this gave the scenario a little more weight--made everything feel a little more somber. The catfight scene in munchkinland, for example, feels a few shades less goofy here, while still retaining its necessary charm, and forms a more natural bridge to the darkness that immediately follows than it did on stage.
But Chu's methods wind up having the opposite effect with the saga's conclusion. I've seen the stage show live twice now, and the ending of the stage production has always left me feeling rather sobered. But seeing the finale play out on film left me exhilarated. This is the one space where Chu's ability to key in on the human piece actually lightened the show. There are some very specific directing choices that can perhaps explain why, and I'll let everyone else see them for themselves.
The same thing that made Chu's outing with In the Heights such a knockout makes these films a score. Where even the MGM film had to frame Dorothy's adventure in an REM cycle in order to make it more palatable, this film believes in the fantasy--it asks you to grab the broomstick with Elphaba and defy gravity.
And it's for that reason that I imagine that some players will choose to reject this movie, or insist that it stay in its lane. That's fine. Those folks can still come over for Thanksgiving. But those of us who have been paying attention to this conversation for some time know just what a special thing a fantasy is, and they really want you to know it too.
Elphaba herself notes in her new solo, "There's No Place Like Home," it's not just that Oz is a physical place. It's the idea and the promise of it that gives it power, but only if you choose to believe in it. And for films that instruct us in how to close our eyes and take that leap, the gratitude owed can hardly be described with simple words.
Which, I suppose is why we even have musicals in the first place.
--The Professor
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