Wicked

The Gravity of Green

I wasn’t exactly clamoring for a film version of *Wicked*. The stage musical has already spent two decades being utterly unavoidable. Still, Jon M. Chu made a certain amount of sense as the person to try it. He understands scale, and he knows how to move a camera through groups of bodies, something he sharpened in the *Step Up* films and pushed further in *In the Heights*. The real danger with a project like this is obvious: please the devotees who know every breath on the cast album, but also make something that feels like cinema instead of a photographed souvenir from Broadway.

What caught me off guard wasn’t the size of it all—though the movie has plenty of that—but how often Chu is smartest when he stops pushing spectacle and simply lets two women occupy the same space. The film’s pulse is much more intimate than its marketing suggests.



The story really lives in bodies, especially the way Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande move through a script that sometimes insists on over-explaining itself. Grande makes a shrewd choice with Glinda. She holds herself like a porcelain figurine: neck straight, gestures precise, every bit of posture carefully arranged for display. It’s funny, but also a little sad. You can feel how much labor goes into maintaining that bright, likable surface. Erivo goes the other direction. Her Elphaba folds inward, shoulders rounded, gaze guarded, energy pulled tight against the constant scrutiny. The character’s whole history of rejection shows up in the way she crosses a room. Wendy Ide in *The Guardian* had it right: "Erivo is terrific, her rich, velvety voice cracking under the weight of rejections and ridicule suffered by Elphaba".

The contrast between them gives the film its best scene, and it isn’t even a big number. It’s the tentative ceasefire at the Ozdust Ballroom.



Elphaba has been tricked into showing up in that awful pointed black hat, and when she steps out alone to dance, the room turns into a low murmur of cruelty. Erivo doesn’t play it as collapse. She adjusts the hat, takes ownership of the humiliation, and moves in this jagged, private rhythm that feels painfully exposed. Then Glinda crosses the floor. Grande lets guilt and resolve flicker across her face before joining in. Their bodies slowly find the same tempo while the rest of the room keeps watching. Chu wisely stays with the moment and lets its quietness do the work. In a movie this loud, that trust matters.

Of course, it isn’t all graceful. The visual palette sometimes slips into that muddy blockbuster murk that drains energy from material that ought to feel vivid, especially once the story leans harder into themes of authoritarianism and systemic prejudice. One critic writing for RogerEbert.com noted that the tone can "swing awkwardly between upbeat wonder and dark oppression," and I think that’s fair. Shiz feels tactile and lived in when the production leans on practical sets, while the larger Emerald City exteriors lose something once the digital gloss takes over.



But every time the machinery starts to feel heavy, the music snaps the film back into focus. The seven-minute "Popular" sequence is a joy, basically a piece of screwball comedy delivered at full speed while Grande swings from chandeliers and slides around the room like she’s turned theater training into a weapon. And yes, "Defying Gravity" lands. Erivo, singing live while suspended in aerial rigs, doesn’t just power through the notes—she shapes the whole emotional turn inside them. You can hear the instant fear gives way to release.

I walked out thinking less about the Wizard or the flying monkeys than about the sadness of a friendship getting crushed inside a corrupt system. Whether the film’s maximalism works for you probably depends on your tolerance for earnestness. For all its bigness, though, *Wicked* is strongest in the fragile little gap between two people who suddenly recognize themselves in each other.