“Wicked: Part One” Defies the Challenges of Adaptation

Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Galinda in Wicked: Part One. Universal Pictures

I thought I knew what to expect from Wicked.

No, I am not one of the 65 million people who have seen the stage version, so feel free to take my opinion with a grain of salt. But I was and am forever a theater kid, so I’m quite familiar with Mr. Stephen Schwartz’s oeuvre. Godspell, Pippin, Working, Children of Eden—you know, all the ones to which I could afford the tickets or my schools could afford the rights. And I am intimately familiar with the music of Wicked, from “Defying Gravity” to “Popular.” Revisiting the soundtrack for this review, I was unsurprised to find I still knew most of it by heart.

So you could argue this movie was made, in part, for me. Finally, after decades, I would learn why Elphaba had to defy gravity and how G(a)linda changed for good (okay, apparently I have to wait until next year for that second one). I don’t know what percentage of viewers this weekend will find themselves in my exact situation, but I have to assume there will be a few of us. It’s worth asking how this film works, not merely as an adaptation of a beloved musical but as its own standalone thing.

Universal Pictures

It’s always difficult to translate an unapologetic stage show to a modern movie. Imagine trying to adapt Hamilton into an aesthetically consistent Revolutionary War film. There’s a fantastic Edgar Wright quote I spent 10 minutes failing to find online, something along the lines of, “Every good movie is a good version of the kind of movie it wants to be and a bad version of every other kind of movie it doesn’t want to be.” He almost certainly said it better than that, but I think it’s relevant here. Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked never had any intention of being a film—it’s a creature of the stage, full of larger-than-life gestures and songs that unambiguously declare what they are thinking. The characters are written in archetype because there’s no camera to zoom in and capture all the little nuance in their faces. They’re perfect at a middle distance, alive to folks in the balcony (or in the back seat of a van headed on a church trip).

Universal Pictures

But when you’re making a film, an incredibly high-profile film, a film with which you’re both trying to win over newcomers and hold on viciously to the hardcore fans, in which the songs need to move with the pacing and tone of their stage companions but also land like they’re being experienced for the first time … well, it’s a little uncanny sometimes. Some moments feel like they demand something different from the go-for-broke approach, and yet the treatment demands fealty to the original. Some of the subject matter, particularly the political plot (which the songs by themselves just barely hint at) feels too menacing to be sandwiched in the middle of a school-based drama.

I know the filmmakers didn’t choose this moment in history, but of course they knew it was a possibility. And their film, to its credit, doesn’t steer away from its darker, unfortunately politically relevant context. Oz in director Jon M. Chu’s Wicked feels a lot like America in 2024, full of prejudice, apathy, cruelty, and terror. But that specter is so vivid right now that it feels a little jarring to conjure it so directly and then jump back to songs about crushes and rivalries. I don’t think Chu is oblivious to this disconnect—I think he’s found many ingenious ways to marry this film’s impossible priorities and succeeded about as well as anyone could.

Universal Pictures

All this to say I enjoyed Wicked Part One. I even think the film’s narrowed focus and perhaps accidental relevance justify the split, no matter how financially motivated. I suspect a great many millions of viewers will agree. Somehow the film captures the movements of the show (or at least the show as I daydreamed based on the album and a few minutes of bootlegs on YouTube) verbatim while fitting in fantastic, quiet little updates where it can. My favorite moment takes place in almost absolute silence, between two characters, eyes locked, sharing a moment that would be incredibly difficult to sell to a 2,000-person auditorium. (This moment exists in the stage show, but it’s treated very differently in every other version I’ve been able to find.)

Chu also gets great performances from both his leads, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. Yes, both are fantastic, which is good given the film absolutely lives or dies on how much we care about them. All the effects and art design and spinning stages in the world couldn’t save us if Galinda came off as too grating or Elphaba’s journey felt unearned. Each is allowed moments where they rise above their character’s archetypal stature, surprise and demonstrate insight.

Universal Pictures

In the end, if this cinematic Wicked inspires audiences as much as its stage-bound predecessor, that will be why. It won’t be that everything feels perfectly coherent—the movie is trying to do too much, and it feels like a lesser version of a great many stories we’ve seen on screen before. But if you take for granted that a Wicked film was always going to happen, and that such a film had certain inevitable qualities and challenges, then to decide how well that film succeeds, you need to look at the choices the filmmaker’s made that weren’t obvious. Chu and his team have chosen to occasionally, briefly, unpretentiously defy expectations, never to deny what Wicked is or to spit in the face of its audience, but not to fully pander either. They suggest how much it could mean in the right context.

I can’t call it a great film, but it is a very good stage-to-screen adaptation. It’s a bit of a Frankenstein, but it’s got a head, a heart, and just the tiniest smidge of courage. Turns out that counts for a lot.