Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in Wicked
WICKED
It goes without saying that the long-awaited arrival of a Wicked movie is being met with feverish anticipation by many sects of the musical's fan base: audiences who've clamored for a screen adaptation ever since the Broadway show and original-cast recording debuted more than two decades ago; youths who became acolytes through an older relative or American Idol or TikTok; Ariana Grande's 376 million Instagram followers. The best news about director Jon M. Chu's film version is that it matches devotees' collective excitement with unmissable, infectious excitement of its own.
Even though this Wicked, which adds a “Part 1” to its title in the opening credits, only covers the first act of the stage production, it runs two hours and 40 minutes. (From what I understand, that's longer than the theatrical experience including intermission.) Yet barring a few stagnant moments and dull songs that I'm betting I'd have found stagnant and dull even in the material's original iteration, I clocked little narrative flab, few scenes that felt unnecessary, and zero instances of anyone simply going through the motions. Beginning with Chu and the peerless pairing of Grande (here credited as Ariana Grande-Butela, her birth name) and Cynthia Erivo, everyone involved seems ultra-cognizant of how much this property means to people, and consequently laser-focused on not screwing things up. This isn't, however, merely a faithful waxworks interpretation in the manner of the first two (and several additional) Harry Potters; nothing about it suggests “Die-hards only, please.” With its script by Dana Fox and the show's original book writer Winnie Holzman, Chu's Wicked is truly alive – imaginative and surprising and a little bit nuts. And while, on several occasions, the film is also deeply affecting, the tears you shed are suffused with the kind of delirious joy sometimes felt during live theatre. You don't just want to applaud. You want to applaud on your feet, and for as long as possible, wishing the feeling would last forever.
I should probably mention up front that the fun I had at this Wizard of Oz offshoot – an origin story for the Wicked Witch of the West based on Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel – was hardly preordained. Although I've never seen Wicked on stage, I did listen to the Broadway soundtrack when it first came out in 2004, and there's a reason I haven't returned to the score over the 20 years since: I thought it was boring. (I'm not in love with composer Stephen Schwartz's contributions to Pippin or Godspell, either.) Most everyone, including me, likes good witch Galinda's (she drops the “a” toward the film's end) peppy anthem “Popular” and wicked witch Elphaba's belting battle cry “Defying Gravity.” Other tunes, though, seemed to me almost uniformly bland, and the movie's rendition of the introductory song “No One Mourns the Wicked” underlined another issue: Schwartz's lyrics, when sung by a large group, tend to be unintelligible. Those who know the music by heart may not register a problem. Yet I spent the entirety of that opening number just struggling to discern what was being sung, and whether this and other aural deficiencies were due to unfortunate mixing I don't know, but the higher notes in Grande's four-octave range also led to her words being almost incomprehensible. Here I was, 10 minutes into a Wizard of Oz story, and I was worried about not being able to get it.
Thankfully, none of the numbers in the 150 minutes that follow are nearly as troublesome, and given the eye-popping visualization of Oz – Such color! So many costumes! – there's so much to take in at the start that you can largely ignore what you're listening to. Ariana Grande, however, is not to be ignored. Wafting in via Galinda's pretty pink bubble, the performer is funny even before she opens her mouth, greeting the Oz-ians with such smiling self-regard and evident condescension that I was laughing well in advance of her breathy, helium-filled readings. When she does start talking, Grande manages the neat trick of being both verbally and physically witty, Galinda's daffy empty-headedness augmented by knowing precisely how to pose and preen for maximum adorableness (or, in the presence of a potential beau, hotness). For much of Wicked's first half, and the especially the first half of this first half, Galinda may be a dumb-blonde stereotype – a Marilyn Monroe figure with the vocal range of Maria Callas. The cleverness behind Grande's acting choices, though, demonstrates the considerable smarts it took to fashion a Galinda this endearing, and she's utterly magical opposite the fearsomely fine Cynthia Erivo, who has perhaps the more formidable task: crafting a Wicked Witch who's not just relatable, but downright moving.
No one familiar with any iteration of Wicked needs to be told that Elphaba, who comes with a heart-tugging backstory, is the musical's chief protagonist, or that her greenness serves as a metaphor for anyone who has ever been unfairly ostracized for being different. (That's partly, if not principally, why the show has been a theatre-kid polestar for 20 years and counting.) From her first appearance, Erivo leans heavily into Elphaba's symbolic weight, and for a time, you may worry that the actor's determination to take her role very, very seriously is going to be a disservice. That's why it's such a delight – your first chance to release a gush of happy tears – to see and hear Erivo cut loose on her soaring “The Wizard and I” solo so early on. The radiant, grinning euphoria she unleashes when Elphaba considers a meeting with Oz's ruler is as expansive, in its less-cornball way, as Julie Andrews crooning “The Sound of Music” on the Swiss Alps (Chu underscores the song with obvious visual comparisons), and you're able to fully gauge how much of the character's sullenness is merely protective. For most of her screen time, Erivo performs with subtle naturalism. Yet that inner fire is always there beneath the surface, revealing itself when Elphaba is at her angriest or most frightened – or, after so much quarreling, when she and Galinda find common ground, and a new best friend besides.
Achieving an unimpeachable performance rhythm, Erivo and Grande give the kinds of screen-musical portrayals that, at present, I can't even think about without welling up. They're so good that the movie doesn't even need the former's goosebump-evoking take on “Defying Gravity” or the latter's vocal/comedic coup de grâce “Popular” – though our overall enjoyment would certainly be lessened without them. (Shrewdly, Chu interrupts both fan-favorite songs with minutes of non-sung dialogue and activity, minimizing your fellow patrons' ability to sing along … not that a few won't try. He also delays the official start to “Popular,” ingeniously, until you're practically begging for it.) But Chu's latest, a worthy successor to his wonderful, woefully under-appreciated-due-to-COVID In the Heights from 2021, is magnificently cast across the board.
As the most revered instructor at Elphaba's and Galinda's Shiz University, Michelle Yeoh could easily have sailed through on natural authority and regal bearing. Instead, she gives a sly, deliciously inscrutable performance in which her sorcery mentor can turn sardonic or sinister on a dime. Jonathan Bailey, playing the rakish transfer student Prince Fiyero Tigelaar, is as riotously self-centered as Galinda and gets a knockout showcase in “Dancing Through Life,” a miniature masterpiece – Chu's best-directed number – of dazzling vocals and alternately sinuous and acrobatic Christopher Scott choreography. (Fiyero is invariably less interesting when he turns out to be less vapid than we imagined, which makes me a tad nervous about Bailey's purpose in next year's part two.) Jeff Goldblum, bless him, refuses to dial down his natural, reliable idiosyncrasy one iota as the Wizard, his eccentrically loopy readings making just about every line sound improvised.
But everyone here, from Ethan Slater as a lovelorn Munchkin to Marissa Bode as Elphaba's disabled sister to the hysterical tag team of Bowen Yang and Bronwyn James as Galinda's bitchy tag-alongs, is in expert form. I'd also be remiss to not mention the essential contributions of Peter Dinklage, who voices Shiz University's talking-goat professor Dr. Dillamond. Not knowing much about the Wicked plot in advance, I was surprised that so much of it focused on a growing movement in the increasingly totalitarian Oz to rid its populace of talking animals. (“But what about the Cowardly Lion?!” I quietly asked no one who heard me.) If reports are to be trusted, replacing the stage version's human actors in animal headwear with computer-animated creatures is a massive improvement, allowing for deeper sympathy for the animals' plight and fuller understanding of why Elphaba goes rogue and sings “Defying Gravity” in the first place. Needless to say, the change also gives us the chance to listen to the gorgeously gruff, soulful vocals of Dinklage, who, like Lupita Nyong'o in The Wild Robot, proves that you don't have to be visible to decimate viewers' hearts.
When it was first announced (though in no way implied in the marketing) that Chu's release would only be the musical's first half and would still boast an epic running length, there were loads of questions, chief among them: How are they going to fill the time? I'm both grateful and relieved to say that I can barely imagine how this thing could be shorter, or why anyone would want it to be. Even songs I don't generally care for, such as “One Short Day,” are shot with terrific enthusiasm and audacity. (That particular tune features cameos by two Wicked veterans whom we just knew would pop up somewhere.) And moments that are apparently quite brief on stage are given proper room to breathe, with the student dance at which Elphaba performs an impromptu solo routine, and she and Galinda finally end their feud, delivering a startling rush of emotion that feels like its own Act I closer. We'll see what happens in 2025 without “Popular” or “Defying Gravity” or, presumably, nearly as much comedy in the mix, although I'm personally dying to see how Elphaba's sister morphs from kindhearted, wheelchair-bound sweetie into the soon-to-be-deceased Wicked Witch of the East. In the meantime, kudos to the entire Wicked team, because handed a most difficult and improbable project, they truly pulled it off. With flying-monkey colors.
GLADIATOR II
It's hard to imagine that Denzel Washington has many regrets about the course of his career. But if this longtime admirer can voice a regret, it's that the man hasn't spent nearly enough time playing movie villains, because Gladiator II, despite being wanting in other ways, is a ticklish reminder of what we've been largely missing. Sure, Washington won an Oscar for his psychopathic L.A. detective in Training Day, and he certainly flirted (and more) with hatefulness in Fences, American Gangster, and The Tragedy of Macbeth. But he's such insane fun as a Roman slimeball in Ridley Scott's historical action epic, so deeply and hilariously insinuating and balls-out vicious, that he simultaneously outclasses both the film and a good half of other, nobler roles on his résumé. As easy as the movie is to sit through, it's only transfixing when Washington is onscreen … and he's never onscreen quite as much as you want.
If it pains me to say that Washington is “merely” a supporting figure in Scott's sequel to his Best Picture winner from 2000, I'm more heartbroken to say that its lead is played by Paul Mescal, because he isn't very good, and I very much wanted him to be. Ever since his breakout in the 2020 limited series Normal People, in which the now-28-year-old Irish actor displayed the sort of powerful masculine sensitivity that made James Dean a legend, Mescal has excelled at brooding, introverted characters, his Oscar-nominated turn in Aftersun especially astounding. And when he amassed raves and an Olivier Award for playing Stanley Kowalski in a West End Streetcar Named Desire (a production coming to Brooklyn early next year), it was reasonable to assume that Mescal possessed external fire to match his soulful interiority – the exact combo seemingly required to play the abandoned son of Russell Crowe's general-turned-gladiator Maximus from 24 years ago. Yet if Mescal's Gladiator II casting seemed ideal in theory, it proves almost disastrous in practice, because at no point do you believe in his Lucius Aurelius as someone capable of leading others into combat, or someone for whom other men would die, or someone who can give a rousing battle speech. During Lucius' first meeting with Washington's gladiator-wrangler Macrinus, the elder Roman says that when he looks at Lucius, all he sees is the rage in his eyes. Rage, however, isn't what the rest of us see. Rather, it's the visible uncertainty of an actor who appears pretty convinced that he's temperamentally all wrong for this job.
To take some heat off its miscast star, most of Scott's unasked-for sequel is equally unsatisfying. Like the 2000 film, Gladiator II boasts backstabbing (both figurative and literal) and political machinations galore: Pedro Pascal's General Acacius is miserable in his role as commander and determined to forge a new Rome; the returning Connie Nielsen, as Maximus' lover and Lucius' mother Lucilla, agrees to aid in her husband Acacius' quest; Joseph Quinn's and Fred Hechinger's twin Emperors Geta and Caracalla enjoy lives of fey cruelty to make Caligula blanch. Yet none of their doings, either dastardly or selfless, have any particular resonance. Scott's work with these actors is so by-the-numbers that, excepting some touching moments of Pascal melancholy, they come off more as character traits than genuine characters, and it's hard not to recall that the narrative venom had far more bite nearly a quarter-century ago. While screenwriter David Scarpa serves up some tasty scenarios, he doesn't provide any juicy dialogue to accompany them, so the threat doesn't linger so much as make its mark and promptly vanish. Scott gives us a warrior riding a rhinoceros and a flooded coliseum filled with sharks and I still forgot much of Gladiator II during the 15-minute drive home.
Those two hysterically unlikely sights are memorable, though, and blessedly, the 86-year-old Scott is too much of a natural showman for his latest to ever be abjectly boring. Although he delivered a similarly overwhelming encounter in last year's Napoleon with more finesse, the opening Roman siege on Africa displays the requisite grandeur, and there's a sensational bit during that questionable maritime event in which a swerving ship destroys its rival's oars; it's easy to imagine Scott giggling when he and his team pulled that one off. A gladiator fight involving crazed baboons – though, weirdly, they look more like the alien invaders from the Quiet Place movies – offers some feral electricity. And the film is sometimes even effective in its quieter passages, as when Mescal is able to relax at last and share some touching performance chemistry with Alexander Karim as the doctor who tends to gladiator wounds. (I'd argue, however, that the duo perhaps shares too much chemistry, as a random line in which the doctor avers his heterosexuality seems blatantly designed to offset arguments that these handsome dudes, with their teasing badinage and easy rapport, should just ditch Rome and run off together.)
Still, it's Washington alone who makes the two-and-a-half hours of Gladiator II worthwhile – at least when he's in sight. He's such a madly inventive performer that he can make a full meal out of a single word, which happens here on “politics,” where he turns its traditional three syllables into something approaching seven or eight. At no point, however, do you not register Washington having the time of his life amidst this gaudy and fairly lugubrious material, Macrinus' slow-boil transformation from mildly skeevy to bitterly vindictive to deliriously sociopathic an escalation to relish. “Are you not entertained?!” Crowe's Maximus famously bellowed in Scott's original Gladiator. Whenever Washington was around, my answer would've been “Hell yeah I am!” Otherwise, my response would've easily veered more toward “I dunno … maybe a little … .”
THE PIANO LESSON
While Washington is delivering the Gladiator II goods, what, you may ask, are his kids up to this weekend? Okay, there probably aren't many of you asking that. But the answer still came in Friday's Netflix debut of The Piano Lesson, an adaptation of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama that Denzel's son Malcolm Washington directed and co-wrote, that his other son John David Washington starred in, and that their dad shepherded alongside producing partner Todd Black. The film is part of Denzel's pledge to bring all 10 of Wilson's famed “Pittsburgh Cycle” plays to either big or home screens, a project that began with 2016's Fences, and continued with 2020's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (also a Netflix production). Although the quality, in my opinion, has been noticeably diminishing with each effort, I'm hoping that Denzel picks up the pace, because at this rate of one every four years, we won't be getting the tenth title until 2052. I fully trust the man to still be a Hollywood force at age 98. Whether 84-year-old me will be sharp enough to view – let alone review – his output is another matter entirely.
A three-hour stage argument/lament that Malcolm Washington and co-screenwriter Virgil Williams have distilled into two hours of streaming, The Piano Lesson concerns a war for the titular instrument waged between siblings of the Charles family in 1930s Pittsburgh. Ne'er-do-well Boy Willie (John David Washington) wants to sell the beautifully hand-crafted piano to set up a farm in their home terrain of Mississippi. His responsible sister Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler), meanwhile, wants to keep the family heirloom because of its connections to their past, and her bone-deep knowledge that ghosts – literal ghosts – of their shared history reside within. This being Wilson, the 1990 play also features intensely well-crafted auxiliary figures: the sibs' uncle Doaker (Samuel J. Jackson), a seen-it-all observer and raconteur; another uncle, Wining Boy (Michael Potts), who used to be a noted pianist; Lymon (Ray Fisher), Boy Willie's friend and partner in his current watermelon-selling trade; Avery (Corey Hawkins), an elevator operator and hopeful clergyman who wants Berniece to marry him; and Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith), Berniece's grade-school daughter who becomes convinced that the ghosts are real. They're all tremendously welcome company. Well … most of them.
I don't know exactly what it is about John David Washington that rubs me the wrong way. I loved him as the hero of Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman, but ever since that 2018 breakout, he's been either unduly smug or instantly forgettable in titles including Malcolm & Marie, Amsterdam, and Christopher Nolan's Tenet. Maybe it's because he so very much sounds like his more naturally gifted dad that I keep hearing echoes without registering accompanying charisma, and he's persistently (advance apologies for the pun) one-note in The Piano Lesson, Boy Willie's arguments for his seizure of the heirloom becoming more labored and tiresome with each new strategy. As written, the character is meant to be an irritant. Yet it feels more like John David is the actual impediment to feeling for Boy Willie as we should, and the situation isn't aided by having the ravishingly emotional Deadwyler play opposite him. After this film and her wrenching, occasionally difficult-to-watch portrayal as Emmett Till's grieving mother in 2022's Till, I'm really, truly hoping that the performer can land in a nice romantic comedy soon. In the meantime, Deadwyler is exceptionally strong here, and handles the material's excessive symbolism and talkiness with efficient, matter-of-fact control. Even when Berneice loses her cool, you know her portrayer is ever-controlled, and while you may be on the character's side by default, Deadwyler ensures that the woman's status as the voice of reason (despite her leanings toward the supernatural) doesn't feel pre-programmed.
I can barely fathom the difficulty involved in whittling three hours of evocative, resplendently beautiful August Wilson conversation down to two: What on earth would you cut? And I applaud director Washington for giving his feature-length debut some visual panache, as it must have been tempting to have all the action, as in the play, simply unfurl in the confines of one rather drab Pennsylvania locale. (Malcolm gives us brief sojourns to Mississippi where the relentless talk can ease up and cinematographer Mike Gioulakis is allowed to let some light shine in.) Yet the loss of so much verbalized poetry leads to much of the film having an “August's Greatest Hits” quality; the exceptional supporting ensemble has little time to luxuriate in the richness of character. And Malcolm is probably several years and movies away from pulling off the effects to tries for at the climax, which is an awkward, rather incoherent blend of real-life and otherworldly happenings. I'm glad I saw The Piano Lesson, but right now, I feel no desire to return to it as I did a couple times with Ma Rainey's and many more times with Fences. That said: Thank you, Denzel. Without your imprint and commitment, loads of audiences wouldn't be seeing these August Wilson works at all.
