I’m a professional and I like to do my homework which is why I was celebrating last night my completion of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude1 which I wanted to read — and appreciate — before we tackled the Colombian miniseries2 based on it.
But I draw the line at researching the musical Wicked or Gregory Maguire’s original novel. In this particular case, life is very much too short and therefore I cannot tell you whether the shortcomings of Jon Chu’s two feature films3 can be laid at the door of either piece of source material.
But shortcomings there most definitely are. This alternative version of The Wizard of Oz makes hardly a lick of sense and takes its sweet time doing it. Wicked: For Good commences with green-skinned magic wielder Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) vanquished from the Emerald City and conducting a campaign of harassment from the skies to try and persuade the city’s citizens that The Great and Powerful Oz (Jeff Goldblum) is not who they think he is.
While the authorities try and hunt down the terrorist, her secret bestie Galinda (Ariana Grande-Butera) becomes a figurehead for the régime and the formerly ditsy Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) is promoted to Captain of Palace Guard despite — even more secretly — holding a candle for Elphaba himself.
The scene is set for a breakdown between all the formerly great friends and the desperate measures that Oz — and the inexplicably motivated lieutenant Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) — are prepared to take to cling on to power.
After the first part, I concluded that Wicked was a one-song musical4, but I will allow that the whole thing is in fact a one-and-a-half song musical, with the number Wonderful amiably performed by Goldblum, Erivo and Grande. Indeed, all of the music is rescued by the performers, especially those with Broadway-quality pipes.
Taken together, the two halves amount to almost five hours of mind-numbing not-quite entertainment but the considerable budget is all up there on the screen — the practical stuff like sets and costumes — and we experienced it with the biggest IMAX crowd I’ve seen for a long while, so it may turn out to be the saviour of cinema after all5.
All of the emotion, sensitivity, humanity and depth of feeling that’s missing from Wicked: For Good appears to have landed on Clint Bentley’s elegiacal Train Dreams which has landed at Netflix after a handful of cinema screenings.
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Joel Edgerton plays a timber worker in the Pacific Northwest in the first half of the last century. Forced by economic circumstance to be away from his family for long periods, he experiences an unimaginable loss and somehow learns to live with that loss and continue to go on with his life.
Based on — and relying heavily on, thanks to extensive narration from Will Patton — a novella by the author of Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson, Train Dreams is lyrical and — thanks to cinematographer Adolpho Veloso — it’s also ravishing to look at.
I wanted to resist it at first — for the first three quarters in fact — as the self-conscious image-making and what felt like Malickian pseudo-spirituality was just trying too hard to be meaningful, but near the end I realised it had successfully snuck its way under my skin and I was in floods of genuine tears.
Train Dreams is a film that I need to see again — this response is very much a preliminary one — but I hardly say that about anything these days, even films I enjoy.
I can only read one novel at a time so the slow pace of Solitude has put a damper on progress towards other fiction.
Season one is streaming on Netflix at the moment and season two is expected next year. There’s a lot of story to pack in so I understand why it is going to be 16 epic episodes long.
Wicked: Part One, the first film, was reviewed here in November last year.
Defying Gravity is a banger.
There is talk that the Wicked well might not be dry and that further sequels are planned.
