Wicked | Gladiator II
The Barbenheimer we deserve this year.
Wicked
First things first: Wicked is really Wicked: Part One, a movie that would feel more like table setting if the songs weren’t doing so much emotional heavy lifting. Unlike other recent musicals, Wicked is not ashamed of being a musical. The film commits its full energy to the power of an grandiose song, belted to the rafters. Who needs a complete plot when you have Cynthia Erivo’s voice? “Defying Gravity” is rousing enough to serve as a climax for a story that won’t be complete for another year.
The high isn’t fully sustainable; Wicked doesn’t know how to focus all of its considerable on-screen energy. Many of the numbers include crowds of dancers, and these sequences keep pushing the main characters to the side and to the back. We are rarely treated to shots of the performers in full, unless they’re in a large group. Crowd scenes don’t fare any better because they have no clear focal point. Most of the individual action takes place in middle shots, from the waist up, as though breath and footwork don’t matter for a complete musical theater performance. The sequences as a whole are so caught up in their own busy-ness that there’s no good place to focus. At its worst, the movie drowns itself out in its own sound.
To be fair, those sounds are mostly sweet. All of the songs come directly from the stage musical, and the casting department did their job well: Cynthia Erivo (who plays Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West) and Ariana Grande (who plays Galinda, the future Glinda the Good) and their voices are the real stars here. The two have decent chemistry, at least when they’re able to distinguish themselves from the background noise and play off each other. Grande in particular seems to relish Galinda’s coquettish mannerisms; Erivo has a dignity that fits her own character quite well. But the maximalism of the movie keeps getting in their way.
The production design is doing too much. Just as the dance sequences keep getting lost in the crowd, the look of the movie is confused. Every line is a curl, every surface is covered in flourishes, as though the organic shapes of Art Nouveau have been overlaid on the angular lines of Art Deco. The result is far too busy, a film whose aesthetic is at war with itself.
Erivo’s costumes—black dresses with severe rows of buttons and diagonally wavy embroidery, a signal that she’ll go against the grain of her conformist school—stand out in their relative simplicity. The rest are simply too much, a series of centerpiece costuming choices that compete with each other only to get lost in the clamor.. As sorcery professor Madame Morrible, Michelle Yeoh wears a heavily embroidered dress with a collar that looks like a half-open book, its pages fluttering atop her shoulders; Bowen Yang (who plays Pfannee, a fellow student) has the misfortune of wearing the ugliest glasses I’ve ever seen.
The point is that Oz’s society is decadent and self-absorbed, but the design and directing end up feeling like distractions, a magician falling for their own sleight of hand. It’s fitting that the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, about whom the characters speak with worshipful reverence, will turn out to be a “humbug” (L. Frank Baum’s word, not mine). Wicked turns The Wizard of Oz on its head, presenting Elphaba as a principled woman making a stand against a corrupt and hypocritical society. It’s easy to feel swept up in her journey, to choose to side with her. Too bad the rest of the film acts as a weight, dragging her closer to earth.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★★☆☆
Gladiator II
One of the more memorable images in Ridley Scott’s 2000 blockbuster Gladiator is of a hand skimming over ripe wheat in a field. It’s shorthand for peace, home, contentment, and the afterlife, all of which can be attained only after the demands of strength and honor have been fulfilled. It’s also an image of potential that has not yet been fully realized—the wheat hasn’t been harvested yet. Scott returns to an inversion of that image early in Gladiator II, only this time, the image is of a man’s hands sifting through kernels of wheat in a basket, threshed but not ground, a little closer to its potential without fulfilling it. Progress has been made between the two movies, though the potential is still unrealized; it won’t satisfy.
We start the same way the original does: with a battle in which a free people stands alone against the conquering might of the Roman Empire. Gladiator is on the side of the Roman army, led by Russell Crowe’s General Maximus, and it never leaves Maximus’s point of view. Gladiator II begins in a much more ambivalent place, with both protagonists in conflict with the Roman Empire’s ideals. Lucius (Paul Mescal) is former royalty, forced to flee across the desert to preserve his own life after the events of the first film, and we meet him as he and his wife prepare to defend Numidia from Roman invasion. On the other side of the battle line is Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), a celebrated general who has grown weary of conquering faraway lands to feed the voracious egos of Rome’s twin emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Herchinger). Flitting through the background is Macrinus (Denzel Washington, playing his role with an unmatched joy), a gladiator sponsor who aspires to higher levels of power.
Maximus’s ideals—“strength and honor”—have disappeared in the years since the first film. That original is about an empire at war with itself, but it never questions the legitimacy of the empire—only the people leading it. Here, the sequel reaches toward a critique of the corruption at the heart of the empire. Nobles enjoy decadent feasts and the sport of gladiatorial combat, while countless citizens huddle outside, hungry, around meager fires, their hands outstretched for help with no one to give them what they need.
The hypocrisy of Rome serves mostly as a backdrop for the action; the real point of Gladiator II (much like the first) is to watch people fight in the Colosseum. The film has a promising start with a battle that’s just as focused on the logistics of war as it is on blood. Scott stages the action with economical precision, showcasing the complexity of laying siege to a beachside city with triremes without losing our attention in the process. Some of the battles in the arena are almost as compelling, though the specifics defy plausibility, even though they’re historically accurate. It’s true that gladiators had to fight wild animals unarmed, and that the Colosseum was flooded to recreate naval battles. It’s also true that Rome was ruled by sibling emperors named Geta and Caracalla. Any familiarity with Roman history beyond these facts will be a handicap; the film’s concern is not historical accuracy but rather blood and notions of honor that are divorced from time and setting.
Those notions of honor are unraveled in the telling. Any pretense of cross-examining the previous film’s earnest themes of patriotism and honor falls apart whenever the swords are unsheathed; the movie is as bloodthirsty as the citizens of the empire it pretends to critique. Gladiator II isn’t able to resolve its competing tensions in an interesting or satisfying way. A house divided cannot stand. It’s hard to deconstruct something if you still hold it above serious reproach.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★★☆☆