Even a Magical Cynthia Erivo Can’t Cast a Spell Strong Enough to Save Wicked

It’s a drag to feel you’re being held hostage by someone else’s nostalgia. The stage show Wicked is beloved by many; it’s been playing on Broadway for 20 years and counting, which means a lot of little girls, and others, have happily fallen under the poppy-induced spell of Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz’s musical about the complex origins of the not-really-so-bad Wicked Witch of the West. Legions of kids and grownups have hummed and toe-tapped along with numbers like “Popular” and “Defying Gravity,” one a twinkly sendup of what it takes to be the most-liked girl at school, the other a peppy empowerment ballad about charting your own course in life. The film adaptation of Wicked—directed by John M. Chu and starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande—will increase the material’s reach, giving many more people the chance to fall in love with it. Or not.

It's the “or nots” who are likely to be the minority. But if you fail to feel the transformative magic of Chu’s Wicked, there are some good reasons: The movie is so aggressively colorful, so manic in its insistence that it’s OK to be different, that it practically mows you down. And this is only part one of the saga—the second installment arrives in November 2025. Wicked pulls off a distinctive but dismal magic trick: it turns other people’s cherished Broadway memories into a protracted form of punishment for the rest of us.

Read more: Breaking Down Wicked’s Iconic Songs With Composer Stephen Schwartz

Wicked the movie is cobbled together from many complex moving parts, and some of them work better than others. Grande plays Glinda, the good witch of Oz—but is she really all that good? The backstory that will consume all two hours and 41 minutes of this movie—roughly the same amount of time as the stage musical, though again, this is only the first half—proves the almost-opposite. This is really the story of Elphaba, played by Erivo, who is, at the movie’s onset, a reticent young woman with dazzling supernatural powers. The problem is that she has green skin, which makes her a target for mockery and derision, an outcast. Elphaba is a reimagining of the character first brought to life by L. Frank Baum in his extraordinary and wonderfully weird turn-of-the-century Oz books, and later portrayed in the revered 1939 Wizard of Oz by Margaret Hamilton. Wicked—whose source material, roughly speaking, is Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West—is built around the idea that Elphaba wasn’t born bad, but was merely forced into making decisions that set her on a path different from that of the insufferable goody-two-shoes Glinda, her enemy turned frenemy turned friend. The story’s subtext—or, rather, its glaring bold type—is that we’re all shaped by our choices, which are at least partly determined by our response to how others treat us.

But you’ve probably come to Wicked not for its leaden life lessons, but for the songs, for the lavish, showy sets, for the chance to watch two formidable performers parry and spar. Grande brings a not-unpleasant powder-room perkiness to the role of Glinda: as the movie opens, she’s entering Oz’s Shiz University, an institution whose radically uncool name will forever tarnish, sadly, the classic and vaguely scatological phrase “It’s the shizz.” Shiz is the place where kids come to learn magic spells and stuff; Glinda arrives with a million pink suitcases, thinking she's going to be the star pupil.

Not so fast: Elphaba has also arrived at the school, but not as a student. She’s just there to drop off her younger sister, Nessa Rose (Marissa Bode). Their father, Governor Thropp (Andy Nyman), has hated Elphaba since the day she was born— remember, she’s green and thus different—while doting on Nessa Rose who is, admittedly, so kind and lovely that it’s impossible not to love her. Elphaba, in fact, adores her. And the fact that she uses a wheelchair makes their father all the more overprotective of her. But as Elphaba goes about the Business of getting her younger sister settled at Shiz, her fantastical powers—they flow from her like electricity, especially when she’s angry or frustrated—catch the attention of the school’s superstar professor, the chilly, elegant Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh). Morrible enrolls Elphaba in Shiz University immediately, making her the unwelcome rooMMAte of Glinda (who is at this point named Galinda, for reasons the movie will explain if you’re curious, or even if you’re not).

Glinda has no use for Elphaba, and goes overboard in making her Shiz experience unbearable. She relegates her roommate to a small, dark corner of their shared quarters and literally crowds her out with mountains of frippery and furbelows, mostly in vibrant shades of pink. In a pivotal scene, she tries to humiliate Elphaba at a school dance and then inexplicably softens; the two become almost-friends. But there’s always an undercurrent of competitiveness there—Glinda isn’t half as gifted as Elphaba is, and she's the opposite of down-to-earth. Grande has some fun with Glinda’s sugary, over-the-top manipulations: she has the fluttery eyelids of a blinking doll and the twirly elegance of a music-box ballerina. But her shtick becomes wearisome. There’s so much winking, twinkling, and nudging in Wicked that I emerged from it feeling grateful—if only momentarily—for the stark ugliness of reality.

There are so many characters, so many plot points, so many metaphors in Wicked—they're like a traffic pileup of flying monkeys. Jonathan Bailey plays a rich, handsome prince who, upon his heralded arrival at the school, instinctively likes Elphaba but ends up going steady with Glinda, who practically hypnotizes him into compliance. Jeff Goldblum plays the Wizard of Oz, a lanky charmer who might be a jerk at best and a pupPet of fascists at worst. Peter Dinklage provides the voice of a beleaguered professor-goat at the school, Dr. Dillamond. Oz is a community where Animals can talk; they’re as intelligent as humans, or more so, and they mingle freely in society. But someone in Oz is seeking to stop all that, launching a campaign to silence all Animals, and Dr. Dillamond becomes their unfortunate victim.

Meanwhile, the big message of Wicked—No one is all good or all bad—blinks so assaultively that you’re not sure what any of it means. Metaphorical truisms ping around willy-nilly: It’s OK, even good, to be different! Those who know best will always be the first to be silenced! The popular girl doesn’t always win! It’s tempting to interpret Wicked as a wise civics lesson, a fable for our times, but its ideas are so slippery, so readily adaptable to even the most blinkered political views, that they have no real value. Meanwhile, there are as many song and dance numbers as you could wish for, and possibly more. Chu—also the director of Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights, both movies more entertaining than this one—stages them lavishly, to the point where your ears and eyeballs wish he would stop.

And yet—there’s Erivo. She’s the one force in Wicked that didn’t make me feel ground down to a nub. As Elphaba, she channels something like real pain rather than just showtune self-pity. You feel for her in her greenness, in her persistent state of being an outsider, in her frustration at being underestimated and unloved. Erivo nearly rises above the material, and not just on a broomstick. But not even she is strong enough to counteract the cyclone of Entertainment with a capital E swirling around her. For a movie whose chief anthem is an advertisement for the joys of defying gravity, Wicked is surprisingly leaden, with a promise of more of the same to come. The shizz it’s not.