Wicked Part One movie review: Grand musical wears its big heart on its dazzling sleeve

Ever since the first note was belted on stage in 2003 in the musical Wicked, it’s a story that has sung out for the big-screen treatment. Why it took two decades is a mystery.

Wicked is full of intense emotions and massive moments that work so much better on screen than it does on stage.

All the tricks that come with cinema – the close-up on a face or being able to focus and hold a detail, the large-scale canvas of landscapes and visual effects, the ability to edit and intentionally pace a scene – greatly benefit this story that felt too contained on the boards.

Even if you didn’t like the play — full disclosure, this reviewer did not — Wicked: Part One is objectively a good film. If you were already all-in on the musical, the ambitious and all-encompassing spectacle of the movie version will overwhelm you to tears, but in a good way.

Wicked doesn’t traffic in subtlety, it doesn’t need to. It wears its big heart on its dazzling sleeve. Everything here is heightened, the laughs, the heartbreak and the joy. Wicked doesn’t do anything by half.

Adapted for the screen by Jon M. Chu, it is a revisionist story centred on the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz via Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel. Instead of being reduced to a label imposed on her by others, this character is given a name: Elphaba.

Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) was born green to a father who never accepted her as his and a mother who died giving birth to her sister, Nessarose (Marissa Bode). From the start, the cards were stacked against her.

Bullied and scorned as a child, no one nurtured her extraordinary gifts, and her magic would emerge whenever she was distressed. When Elphaba arrives as a young woman at Shiz University, everyone gasps at her mere presence.

That’s enough to give anyone a complex.

One of those hostile people is Galinda (Ariana Grande), an ambitious and privileged classmate who is certain of her destiny as popular and bound for great things. What she doesn’t bank on is Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), a renowned sorceress who has no time for Galinda but takes great interest in Elphaba.

Wicked is a story of these two young women whose lives and futures become intrinsically tied, morphing from a crunchy relationship into one of deep friendship. Like any effective musical, this growth is told through songs including “Popular”, “I’m Not That Girl” and “The Wizard and I”.

Erivo and Grande are incredible vocalists with perfect control. They both sang their numbers live on set, not recorded in a studio booth and played back. It’s incredibly impressive.

Grande has the comic energy to pull off the combination of ridiculousness and genuine likeability in Galinda, while Erivo is an absolute star, grounding Elphaba’s vulnerability and pain with her affecting performance as someone who discovers her tenacity and purpose lie within.

This is a key reason why Wicked works better on screen. There’s an intimacy between the audience and all the pathos Erivo is bringing to that character. You can see it plainly, no matter where you’re sitting in a theatre.

Elsewhere, Jonathan Bailey is charismatic as the dumb-but-charming Fiyero, and there’s a campness to his song-and-dance number, “Dancing Through Life” that will stir the loins in a whole range of viewers.

Yeoh is imperious as Madame Morrible, whose true agenda is revealed in degrees, and Jeff Goldblum is, well, Jeff Goldblum-y (and that’s all we ever ask of him) as the Wizard, the man behind the curtains who would prefer to rule by uniting his followers through a common hatred.

Chu has solid experience as a director who can pull together the many demands of a movie of this scale, having already done a big studio musical with In The Heights, a rom-com with vigour and colour in Crazy Rich Asians as well as two Step Up flicks and a pair of Justin Bieber concert films.

That might be the resume you want for someone to take on Wicked but, really, Chu is the artist for the job because he has great instincts for balancing the grandiose with believable emotions.

But Wicked is a musical and its strength lies in elevating its genre conventions, not breaking out of them. This means there is a certain overt sentimentality to it that won’t vibe with all audiences. You know who you are.

It is also - just like the stage musical - rather slight and surface-level when it comes to its allegorical elements, unlike Maguire’s book, which is a biting and scathing examination of politics, power and fascism.

For a movie that hits two hours and forty minutes, it’s surprisingly well-paced, always clipping along without luxuriating too much nor rushing through. That’s crucial considering this is not the whole story, it only goes up to where the act break for intermission happens in the stage version.

Even if you have to wait a year for part two, it leaves on a high, literally, ending with the showstopper signature song, “Defying Gravity”, a number that pulses with energy, roaring with the full force of Erivo’s vocals and Elphaba’s fire.

Bring on part two.

Rating: 3.5/5

Wicked: Part One is in cinemas on November 21, with evening previews today