I watched it again last night, realizing only yesterday that the release date for Wicked: For Good was coming up already this week. If I were going to watch the first one, my #2 movie of 2024, as preparation for the concluding half of the story, Saturday night was the last weekend night I'd be able to do that, assuming I'm going to try to get on the sequel early in its release in order to review it. And you need a weekend night for a movie like this with its 160-minute running time.
I knew almost from the moment I started watching that Wicked was not going to do it for me the way it did it for me on the first viewing.
And I don't think it's just a year's worth of realizing what everyone else thinks of Wicked, of inevitable Wicked backlash, of other cinephiles you know and love -- and more to the point, respect -- thinking your aesthetic judgment is compromised if you have made this movie essentially your vice president of 2024 movies. That's right, if The Substance ever died, Wicked would become president of my 2024 movies. (Because I saw The Substance first, fortunately, Wicked was never in a position where it was actually ranked #1 in my rankings in progress.)
No, I think it's just that my first Wicked viewing occurred under circumstances that could never be duplicated, even if they were unremarkable circumstances in most respects.
When I saw the movie around this same time last year, it was as a weekend matinee, possibly even a pre-11 a.m. start time. I've been eyeballing movies with early start times like this this year as well. It's a way for me to get in a few extra screenings in the theater, especially since we're getting to the time when I'll have a harder time seeing these on video before my mid-January ranking deadline.
Wicked I viewed as sort of an obligation. I put on my "ReelGood is a paper of record" hat and went to see it so we could get a review up. (If you don't know what that means, a "paper of record" is how journalists describe a newspaper that wants to in some way include all the news that's out there. If it happened, you'll find it somewhere in the pages of the newspaper.)
I was not expecting to hate Wicked, of course, but I had no attachment to the source material, never having seen it or really knowing much about it other than its obvious placement within the Wizard of Oz universe. I was expecting to find it middling with a possible high-end outcome of being sort of good. Crucially, I saw it early enough that I had not even heard what others thought, so I was able to go in with these low expectations.
Then of course I was floored by it, and I cried during the scene at the dance.
Tears go along way toward clouding my judgment about a movie. You may remember I have expressed some similar regrets at times about The Whale, which found me in a similar vulnerable spot emotionally (at a similar time of the day, wondering if that's related), and that elevated it all the way to my #1 of 2022. Tears are the purest expression we have that whatever sparks them is having a profound impact on us, and when that's a piece of art, it means there is something fundamentally good, or at least effective, about that art.
I never got to an equivalent place in the rest of Wicked as I did with that scene at the dance, but I was already a goner for this movie at that point. I had already computed the five stars in my head.
After last night's viewing, I'm thinking "Four? Three and a half?"
Because I've lived with my opinion of Wicked for a year and enshrined it in permanence when I published my rankings, I cannot comprehend nor abide such a drop in my feelings toward it. But let me try to delve into it:
1) This time I came in on guard. I had sort of convinced myself that my affection for Wicked gave me something in common not with the cinephiles I respect, but with a less discriminating form of moviegoer. I'm supposed to be above the more conventional movie tactics that speak to those sorts of moviegoers. And though I do know plenty of "respected critics" who felt strongly about the movie, it's the snobs' opinions we always remember, that eat away at some inner insecurity in us.
2) I was a lot more distracted by the many digital effects in the film. Maybe that's just a year more in our collective shunning of digital effects weighing on me there. But I did really notice how much of this movie is not really there.
3) I started watching it at 10:30, after a handful of drinks. (Drinks also being a factor in my Friday night viewing of Friendship, as I wrote about yesterday. Okay, maybe drinks before movies is not a good idea.)
I think the last factor is the one that prevents me from having quite so much despair about liking Wicked so much less.
Whereas I suspected I might have missed some moments in Friendship, I know I missed some of Wicked's 160 minutes due to short bouts of sleep. It couldn't have been a lot, becaue I still finished around 2 after naps of indeterminate lengths in which I paused the film. But I definitely missed some. I usually pause a movie when I fall asleep, but that's only if I see it happen and I don't try to fight it. When I try to fight it, sometimes I lose.
I also was pretty sure it wouldn't matter if I slept during some of Wicked. I'd already seen it. This was basically just a refresher to put me in a Wicked: For Good mindset.
So I don't think it really made a difference that I missed some of it. I think I just liked it less.
Ariana Grande's performance had been one of my favorite parts of my first viewing. It was here too, but I didn't remember as many moments where I felt so charmed and disarmed by a particular choice. There was definitely an element of surprise in that the first time, and obviously you don't get surprised by things on a second viewing.
My second Wicked experience reminds me even more of an underlying reality of ranking movies: You can't possibly know which will endure in your hearts. You can make educated guesses, but really, you are describing a moment in time, an exact set of circumstances that existed in both you, as the viewer, and the cinematic landscape at large. I saw Wicked a couple weeks after Trump was reelected. Did that have something to do with it, particuarly in the case of a Black actress playing an outcast in the person of Cynthia Erivo? Sure it could have. I may have even consciously acknowledged that to myself at the time. Now I'm just a year more dead inside due to the Trump presidency in progress, more resigned to cynicism with my emotions less on the surface.
The reason I'm writing this post is, well, because I post most days and I am usually writing about one of my most recent experiences as a movie lover. But there may be an extra boost of urgency here, because I think I do want you, my readers, to know that although I think Wicked is a very good film, I no longer feel the five-star enthusiasm that I felt this time last year.
Maybe now I can adopt a position that splits the difference between what the most serious cinephiles in my orbit, and what the lovers of big spectacle and musical theater in my orbit, think of this movie.
No comments:
Post a Comment