Fascism has come to Oz in “Wicked: For Good,” and there’s no wishing it away. That is one of the truths in the less frenetic, more downbeat second half of this screen adaptation of the Broadway musical “Wicked.” A feature-length wrap-up, the new movie finds its twinned charmers — Cynthia Erivo’s vividly green Elphaba and Ariana Grande’s pretty-in-pink Glinda — decamped to separate corners of the Land of Oz. No longer students, they have graduated to full-fledged adulthood, another enchanted realm of dangers and wonders. Here, flying monkeys help usher in a new normal as does a bared princely chest (oh, my).
A showcase largely for Grande, “For Good” ties together loose ends in a story with many moving parts and a complex provenance. This is, after all, a two-part movie based on a Broadway musical that was adapted from a novel that, in turn, was inspired by both a popular children’s book and its most famous adaptation, that 1939 wonderment, “The Wizard of Oz.” It’s a lot. Given the material’s scope, history and multigenerational fan base, the director Jon M. Chu needs to be at once a factory foreman and a circus ringmaster, someone who can firmly hold the audience’s attention, even when the machinery sputters and creaks.
With an army of technicians and, crucially, two appealingly synced stars, Chu has managed to give “Wicked” coherence and a strong heartbeat. Like part one, “For Good” is stuffed with stuff — a muted rainbow of colors, swirling camerawork, choreographed crowds, filigreed ornamentation — which, generally, is the case with contemporary blockbusters. For starters, there’s all that money a filmmaker has to spend, a demand that encourages maximalism as does the commercial imperative of wowing the audience, especially for the all-important opening weekend. (In the 1950s, studios turned to blockbusters to compete with TV; cellphones are now the primary competition, at least until a movie hits streaming.)
Written by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox — with songs by Stephen Schwartz — “For Good” picks up where the first half effectively ended. Elphaba now lives in elevated pastoral solitude while Glinda is flouncing around Emerald City in a gleaming bubble world, trailed by a coterie of sycophants. It’s not a good or promising look, and neither are the land’s soft-serve villains — Michelle Yeoh’s Madame Morrible and Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard — who are continuing to scheme their schemes. Together, they rule over Oz with wide smiles, an ethos of abundance, armed troops and a class of enemies among the land’s talking animals, whose rights are being rapidly erased and whose dire predicament foretells other oppressive moves.
The first part of “Wicked” primarily focused on Elphaba, her past and outcast identity, as well as on her and Glinda’s complementary coming-of-age stories and deepening friendship. It was also about the rot under Oz’s shiny surfaces. It is the empathetic Elphaba who discovers the Wizard and Morrible’s plan to deploy the flying monkeys as an airborne surveillance system while the other animals are being censured, penned and silenced. As the Wizard explained to Elphaba in the first half, “the best way to bring folks together is to give them a real good enemy.” Talking animals are one such contrivance; by the end of part one, Elphaba is another.
These invocations of the horrors of fascism were startling in the first half, and while they’re more pronounced in part two, they’re embedded in a movie that does everything it can to accentuate the positive. As the tale evolves, alliances are formed and ties severed, amid routinely timed musical numbers that oscillate between shouty group set pieces and quieter, intimate interludes. Among the movie’s nicer surprises is Grande, who here has the room to turn an irksome caricature into a character. Partly fortified by Elphaba’s moral conviction, Glinda begins to understand the truth about Oz and her own complicity in its oppressiveness, a transformation that Grande puts across with gestural delicacy and touching vulnerability.
Less welcome is the story’s resident heartthrob, Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), who has returned with a melancholiac mooniness. It’s not Bailey’s fault; it’s the character, a convention that, at least in part, seems to exist to make the contours of Elphaba and Glinda’s relationship clear. “For Good” amps the story’s romantic tension and as the story zigs and zags, Fiyero ends up in bed with his shirt off, nuzzling his true love. That nudges events into a somewhat more grown-up, or at least adolescent, register of many screen fairy tales, even as this one remains fixed on Elphaba and Glinda. Despite its unsettling political resonance, “Wicked” is finally most convincing as a story of an intense, soulfully nurturing female friendship.
L. Frank Baum’s original 1900 book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” has been interpreted along pro-suffrage and populist lines, though over the years it has been reshaped to fit its times. “The Wizard of Oz” turns on a Kansas girl who leaves her black-and-white farm life for a glorious Technicolor dreamland, a soaring metaphor for the transporting pleasures of filmgoing in Depression-era America. Like most studio movies, “Wicked” blunts any overt political message; it’s about right and wrong more than left or right. Even so, from its director to its cast, the movie is a testament to diversity (species included) as a common good as well as to love, friendship and solidarity. It’s on the side of kindness, which is itself, well, a balm.
Wicked: For Good Rated PG. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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