“Depraved: For Good” Is Very, Very Unhealthy

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, at the same time as he and Glinda are pressured into a really public engagement, the air is thick with political and emotional subterfuge. Theirs shouldn’t 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 every thing on this film, for all its lavishly gilded, emerald-studded set design, both too dim or too shiny—so blindingly backlit that Oz appears to be below 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 probably the most wretched facets 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 riot, 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 route during which all that is headed. Simply observe 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, endlessly conjoined within the public creativeness, could be maneuvered into place. However should they be maneuvered so clumsily, and with such a obvious absence of brains or coronary heart? In time, we can 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 kids can abdomen the Tin Man’s arrival, the Scarecrow’s cornfield crucifixion may 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 buddies 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 convey 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 very least, the musical is fabricated from softer stuff. The much less stated the higher about Elphaba and Fiyero’s drippy seduction quantity (“In some way I’ve fallen / below your spell / And by some means 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 issues in one other means.” How’s that for flattery?

Some professional 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 frequent 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 activity 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 sincere. “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 turn out to be 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 could be appeased by the phantasm of a standard enemy. The cynicism, though hardly misplaced, feels totally 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 concerning the historical past, tradition, and politics of the realm, and even concerning the potential stakes of the folks’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. ♦