In the end, any review of a movie adaptation of a popular Broadway musical must contend with diehard fans of the stage version, who will invariably love the film because it was most likely made with them in mind. Any reservations I might have about Wicked‘s basic story and the songs themselves are irrelevant, because I’ve never seen the musical performed on stage and, in fact, know almost nothing about it except that it is based on a novel that purports to be the origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West, and that at one time it was the longest running musical on Broadway. Some critics who are already fanboys or fangirls have griped about the length—the movie will be in two two-and-a-half hour parts, while the complete stage version is a little over two hours—without actually condemning it for it. I confess to having been swept up in the spectacle of it all without necessarily gaining a clear understanding of what it all means, but that may have less to do with the musical elements than with the fantasy ones, which more formally resemble Harry Potter than anything I took away from watching the original Wizard of Oz on TV every spring as a child.

The Potter affinity is right there in the setting, which for most of the action is Shiz University in the land of Oz, to which Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), a social outcast as an adolescent due to the green hue of her skin, has matriculated in order to major in sorcery thanks to exceptional academic abilities, thus making all sorts of DEI connections in the minds of viewers who lived through the civil rights years. Naturally, she’s ostracized in her new surroundings, a situation she defies with admirable grit, and yet becomes friends with the most popular young woman on campus, Galinda (Ariana Grande), after an initial barrage of cold shoulders. Galinda is already a member of the elite, and comes with her own entourage (Bowen Yang, Bronwyn James), who provide much of the movie’s comic component with their effete fawning over this delicately wrought idol. Director John Chu, who also helmed the effective film adaptation of another Broadway musical, In the Heights, does a great job with the humor and the musical numbers—especially the choreography—but allows the plot development to bog down with sluggish pacing that, I assume, is a function of stretching the material into two parts. Nevertheless, the story gains traction on its overall anti-authoritarian theme by doubling down on a subplot having to do with disenfranchising the four-legged citizens of Oz through the systematic removal of their ability to speak, a cruel campaign that Elphaba, being an outsider as well as the sister of a disabled student, fights against. When she enlists Galinda in her crusade, the two become soulmates of a sort that will make their inevitable break all the more dramatic and heartbreaking. After all, we have to reach the point where the intelligent, righteous Elphaba becomes wicked and the comedy turns to tragedy.

In this context, much of the meta-material that refers to the lore of the stage version feels like so much padding to a neophyte like me, but I got the appeal, which feels almost bedrock, as if Chu and company decided that they didn’t need to pander to those of us who weren’t hip to the original’s charms because those charms were self-evident. I grew up attending Broadway musicals and listening to original cast albums of the classics, so it’s not as if I’m immune to those charms, but while I liked Stephen Schwartz’s and John Powell’s songs more than much of the post-Andrew Lloyd Webber stuff that’s dominated musicals in the past forty years, I didn’t leave the theater humming any tunes. But that may have more to do with lost youth than with the inherent quality of the songwriting or presentation. 

Steven Soderbergh’s latest indie curiosity is a fantasy of an entirely different stripe—a ghost story, but one that, initially, at least, pretends to be unconventional. Soderbergh dons his cinematographer hat in a big way by not only shooting the movie himself—something he often does anyway—but making the camera the central character, the ghost, as it were. And this ghost, or “presence,” as the title describes it so aptly, does manage to evoke a personality through the director’s imaginative use of space, movement, and, most interestingly, framing, which adopts a slightly skewed wide angle. 

The atmospheric effects of Soderbergh’s camera work are so intriguing, in fact, that the plot feels as if it’s just getting in the way. Veteran Hollywood screenwriter and sometime director David Koepp wrote the script, which demands attention. The haunted house is a beautiful old pile in a New Jersey suburb that is bought by a family of four, and much of the movie is given over to the Presence eavesdropping on blackout-structured conversations between various family members, the go-getting, ethically compromised executive career-track mother (Lucy Liu), the more laid-back and morally stringent father (Chris Sullivan), the bully-jock older son (Eddy Maday), and the sensitive, traumatized younger teenage daughter (Callina Liang). We quickly determine that the household is of two camps—mother-son versus father-daughter—and the conceit of observing these interactions from the POV of the Presence lends the storytelling an otherworldly quality that intensifies the drama. 

Things become more involving but less interesting when the story takes on the trappings of a thriller, as the son invites a friend into the home who soon has designs on the daughter. The girl, who is still recovering from the mysterious death of a friend, is the only person in the house who senses the Presence, thinking it may be the spirit of her friend, and in that state she’s susceptible to this adolescent intruder’s serpentine appeal. I thought the movie would explore more incisively the breakdown of a nuclear family, but it ends up as a mild horror story whose plot logic doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. I liked it better when it was simply an exercise in creepy atmospherics. 

Wicked now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Presence now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Wicked home page in Japanese

Presence home page in Japanese

Wicked photo (c) Universal Studios

Presence photo (c) 2024 The Spectral Spirit Company