As a part of an anti-Depraved Witch of the West smear marketing campaign, Morrible tries to ensnare the loyalties of Elphaba’s closest ex-classmates: Glinda, a smiling but conflicted mascot for the Oztocracy, and the dashing Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), now captain of the Wizard’s guard. However Fiyero’s coronary heart belongs to Elphaba, and, whilst he and Glinda are pressured into a really public engagement, the air is thick with political and emotional subterfuge. Theirs will not be the one romantic complication afoot. For my style, an excessive amount of of “Depraved: For Good” performs like “Oz the World Turns,” although I’d credit score most daytime cleaning soap operas with superior manufacturing values. Why is all the pieces on this film, for all its lavishly gilded, emerald-studded set design, both too dim or too brilliant—so blindingly backlit that Oz appears to be underneath perpetual thermonuclear assault, or so murky that you could possibly scarcely inform a monkey from a Munchkin?
Munchkinland, because it occurs, is now ruled by Elphaba’s youthful sister, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who doesn’t share her sibling’s ironclad integrity. Nessarose makes use of a wheelchair, and some of the wretched points of “Depraved: For Good” is its conflation of bodily incapacity and soul-crushing bitterness. Nessarose has been given nothing else to specific; she’s clingy, thwarted jealousy personified. She resents Elphaba for her rebel, simply as she resents Boq (Ethan Slater), a Munchkin she loves, for abandoning her to pursue Glinda. Boq’s surname, by the way in which, is Woodsman, and also you needn’t be an Ozphile to sense the grim course by which all that is headed. Simply comply with the yellow brick highway.
This, so far as I can inform, is why “Depraved: For Good” exists: in order that the occasions of Baum’s novel and the 1939 movie, ceaselessly conjoined within the public creativeness, might be maneuvered into place. However should they be maneuvered so clumsily, and with such a evident absence of brains or coronary heart? In time, we will probably be launched to Dorothy Gale—cue a couple of flashes of gingham—and force-fed origin tales for her travelling companions, which vary from the nonsensically contrived to the gratuitously traumatizing. (Even when your youngsters can abdomen the Tin Man’s arrival, the Scarecrow’s cornfield crucifixion is likely to be the final straw.) Onstage, all this narrative retconning has a breezy behind-the-scenes cleverness, as if the story have been being slyly fleshed out within the margins. Onscreen, and on full show, it’s near an abomination—a travesty of fairy-tale logic and pop-cultural reminiscence. By the point Dorothy and her associates march on Elphaba’s lair, there appears to be one thing extra pernicious than mere mediocrity at work. It’s as if the image have been so cowed by its iconic predecessor that it might solely reply with a petulant urge to destroy the basic it might by no means be.
Maguire’s novel was itself written within the spirit of a corrective; it aimed to deliver a morally ambiguous modernism and a grownup, forthright sexuality to bear on Baum’s squeaky-clean demarcations of fine and evil. However on the carnal entrance, at the least, the musical is made from softer stuff. The much less mentioned the higher about Elphaba and Fiyero’s drippy seduction quantity (“Someway I’ve fallen / underneath your spell / And one way or the other I’m feeling / it’s up that I fell”), or about what passes, miserably, for pillow discuss: “You’re stunning,” Fiyero coos, and, when Elphaba accuses him of mendacity, he replies, “It’s not mendacity. It’s taking a look at issues in one other approach.” How’s that for flattery?
Some legit ardour does erupt when Elphaba and Glinda, reunited by tragedy, let their long-simmering rivalry bubble over in a wand-versus-broomstick smackdown. Which witch emerges victorious—not simply from that catfight however from the entire of this busy, confused, hopelessly mangled film? I’d say the movie is lucky to have them each. Within the first installment, Erivo made widespread decency really feel dramatic; right here, it’s satisfying to see Elphaba in aggressive defiance of the Wizard’s regime. Grande, too, has come into her personal. After her delicate comedian excessive jinks in “Half I,” she has the trickier process of expressing Glinda’s first actual expertise of rejection and disillusionment. “It’s time for her bubble to pop,” she sings of herself, in a quavering ballad—certainly one of two new songs, neither memorable, that Schwartz wrote for the movie. This uncommon second of self-awareness arrives at maybe the least opportune time: Glinda is in her luxurious tower room, watching from on excessive because the Emerald Metropolis descends into chaos.
It’s tone-deaf however trustworthy. “Depraved: For Good” is suffering from references to the fool lots of Oz—their gullibility, their venality, their stupidity. Elphaba makes use of this as justification for why she should in the end sacrifice herself and change into a public image of evil incarnate: as she tells Glinda, “They want somebody to be depraved, as a way to be good.” The Wizard espouses his personal model of this concept, assured that the general public might be appeased by the phantasm of a typical enemy. The cynicism, though hardly misplaced, feels completely unearned. The “Depraved” films by no means persuade us—in the way in which that “The Wizard of Oz” or Walter Murch’s darkly thrilling “Return to Oz” (1985) satisfied us—of the fantastical actuality of Oz as an precise place. Chu and his screenwriters evince no curiosity in regards to the historical past, tradition, and politics of the realm, and even in regards to the potential stakes of the individuals’s capitulation to the Wizard’s fascism. The residents of Oz are handled as not more than an undifferentiated crowd of extras, an ignorant and at last disposable monolith. The film’s flattery of the viewers, and of our supposedly superior conscience, is an expression of the identical contempt. ♦
