WICKED FOR GOOD**

WICKED FOR GOOD is the second part of John M. Chu's adaptation of the wildly successful Broadway musical. The action takes place a year after the first part. The genuinely magical Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) has scorned the fraudulent Wizard's offer to share power and is desperately trying to expose his lies.  Meanwhile, her childhood best friend Glinda (Ariana Grande) has fallen in with Madam Morrible's plans for propaganda against Elphaba, while still hoping to broker a reconciliation. Glinda remains in love with the dashingly handsome Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), and Nessarose (Marissa Bode) remains in love with Bok (Ethan Slater). Let's just say that Glinda takes romantic disappointment with more elegance than Nessa.

The problem with splitting the musical into two is that the first half contains the stronger music and all the fun.  This latter half is an almost uninterrupted downer. Oz is descending into authoritarianism policed by flying monkeys.  Almost everybody is romantically disappointed.  Worst of all, we so rarely see Glinda and Elphaba together on screen.  Whenever we do, the movie springs to life, grounded in their love for each other. The only genuine laugh of the film happens when they fight 90 minutes in. The only tears that threaten are when they sing of how the other has changed them "for good" in the final act.  When the film centres their story, and unites them, it is an altogether more engaging beast.  But when they are apart, boy, is it dull and dispiriting. Does anyone really care about Nessa and Bok, or catch any kind of romantic spark between Fiyero and Elphie? As for the Wizard and Morrible, while Jeff Goldblum is having fun indulging himself, I doubt anyone else is amused. And as badass as Michelle Yeoh is, she cannot sing.

So we twist the gears to our finale. If the first film was really Elphie's journey to self-actualisation and belief then this film is Glinda's.  I loved her arc, and the new song about a spoiled girl whose bubble probably should be popped was both beautiful and meaningful. And of course the whole thing is a technical marvel - beautifully costumed and designed.  But I continue to believe that it would have been better as one film with fewer songs and a more complete and balanced narrative arc. 

WICKED FOR GOOD is rated PG and has a running time of 138 minutes. It will be released on November 21st. 

WICKED: PART I***

I came to WICKED: PART I cold. I had not seen the musical, heard any of the songs, and was unspoiled as to plot.  Here is what I discovered:

The movie is Act One of a two act musical that serves as a prequel to THE WIZARD OF OZ.  It begins with the death of the Wicked Witch of the West as announced by the Glinda the Good Witch and then takes us back to their teenage friendship at the unfortunately named Shiz University.  

We learn that the Wicked Witch was actually a thoughtful, earnest, sensitive girl called Elphaba who had been spurned by society because of her green skin and her frighteningly uncontrollable actual magic powers. She dreamed of meeting the Wizard of Oz so that he could grant her a wish.  As Galinda soon realises, that wish is to get rid of her green skin, because as much as Elphaba pretends not to care what people think about her, of course she does.  Thanks to a mix-up, the two teenagers become best friends.  Galinda begins to discover her conscience just as Elphaba discovers that she has a crush on Galinda's dashing and apparently superficial boyfriend Fiyero. They bond over their shared horror at the persecution of animals, who have hitherto lived side-by-side with humans in a Bojack Horseman style world. The film culminates in the girls finally arriving in the Emerald City to meet the Wizard and asking for her heart's desire....

Let's start with the negatives. First of all, the music is not to my taste. The vast majority is derivative, mediocre and eminently skippable. The exceptions are the songs Popular and Defying Gravity, but that's thin gruel for a two hour, forty minute running time. Second of all, the themes of the musical are obvious, ham-fisted and trite.  I feel that I have seen a bazillion movies about how the uniquely talented but superficially different people are excluded and mocked only to use their power for vengeance. X-MEN anyone?  And oh the delicious irony of a film so very inclusive that refuses to cast even one little person as a munchkin.  Third, the plot is just so blatantly obvious. I guessed the plot twist concerning the Wizard and the plot twist concerning Fiyero while watching Act One, and googled post-film to confirm my guesses.

Still, there's a lot to love too, and on the whole I did enjoy watching the film.  The production and costume design are exceptionally good, and I loved the steampunk aesthetic of the world.  Ariana Grande is hilarious as Galinda and Cynthia Erivo (HARRIET) is heartbreaking as Elphaba, and on the rare occasions when they sing together it's just so perfectly harmonious it's joyous. The two actresses evidently fell in love with each other during filming and that reads on screen. When they share a moment on a dance floor it brings tears to our eyes.  They are the reason why the running time flies by so fast and why - despite the largely mediocre score and unsubtle politics - the film is memorable.

WICKED: PART I is rated PG and has a running time of 160 minutes. It is on global release.

HARRIET

Watching HARRIET a day after QUEEN & SLIM was quite the provocative double-bill. The former is a film about a true-life hero - a woman who escaped from slavery and then went back to free others - a woman who became a Union scout in the civil war, and led a military raid - a woman who campaigned for women's rights.  What would she make of contemporary America - the world where QUEEN & SLIM are forced to go on the run after facing a racist police attack?  Would Harriet feel her race had progressed at all? And what of her sex?  In HARRIET we see her under-estimated by Thomas Still - as just a petite illiterate woman who could never be an Underground Railroad conductor.  And we don't see it in this film, but we know she was never paid properly for her work as a Union Scout because she was both black and a woman. That misogyny is still present in QUEEN & SLIM - not least in the character that Bokeem Woodbine plays.  And what of the meaning of iconography and history?  Harriet Tubman's story is not often taught in schools - Steve Mnuchin resisted putting her on the twenty dollar bill, leaving slave-owning Andrew Jackson on there.  Neither the film HARRIET nor QUEEN & SLIM have had the award-season recognition they deserve. Heck, HARRIET took decades to even get made. Taken together, they make for deeply, provocatively, depressing viewing.  Slavery is illegal now, but we have a white supremacist president. A white man could walk with impunity into a rich, FREE, black woman's house in 1850 and brutalise her.  A white police offer shoots an educated, FREE, black woman in the leg in 2019 without impunity....

Anyway - let's get to the film review! HARRIET is a handsomely made biopic about a truly heroic woman. Cynthia Erivo (TV's THE OUTSIDER) plays Harriet with a fierce, earnest, anger and an almost disturbing religious certainty.  It's interesting to me that writer-director Kasi Lemmons' chooses not to interrogate how far Harriet's religious visions were just the product of being brutalised with a head injury.  In general, this is a film of earnest faith, and that may be off-putting to some. The only doubt shown that her visions are just brain damage is signalled by a character who is clearly sexist so we're being told not give them credence. I did however like how a preacher (Vondie Curtis-Hall) that we are led to believe is an Uncle Tom appeaser actually turns out to be a node on the railroad, showing us the difficult choices facing black people - having to show an outward face of conciliation while being subversive.  

Harriet never doubts herself, though, and that makes her an almost unapproachable, and certainly irreproachable heroine. Characters in this film are either all the way good or bad. The most interesting character is therefore that of Marie, played by Janelle Monae (HIDDEN FIGURES). She's an elegantly dressed free rich black woman who is roundly censured by Harriet for not being sympathetic for what it means to be a slave. But she shows her own heroism in the end. I also liked the character of a young black boy who starts off helping slave-catchers before finding his conscience.  It's also rather brave to show that black people and indeed native Americans were complicit in slavery. 

But as we rapidly move through Harriet's work on the railroad into the civil war, I did wonder at Kasi Lemmons omitting Harriet's involvement in the notorious and disastrous Harper's Ferry Raid by John Brown. Maybe this was too difficult and complicated to include - and it remains a rather controversial event. Brown was an abolitionist and so one of the good guys right! But then again his rogue militancy didn't help the cause - in fact in made it harder for the abolitionists in congress to deal with increasingly paranoid slave states. The problem is that if we don't deal with Harriet's controversial judgements, then we are left with nothing more than almost religious icon.  

Still, there's a magnetic fascination with Erivo's performance. And for those of us outside of the US who have little US history in our schooling, the film serves a worthy purpose of educating us. I hadn't been aware, for example, of just how many free blacks lived alongside enslaved blacks in Delaware, and the legal and emotional complications of mixed marriages. I also loved John Toll's cinematography.  There's a kind of cliche of the southern slave film, bathed in warm yellow light and the heat of the cotton plantation.  It's good to recognise how far north slavery went.

HARRIET has a running time of 125 minutes and is rated PG-13. HARRIET played Toronto 2019 and was released in the USA and UK last November and is now available to rent and own.