The Wicked And the Brutal
Catching up with a couple of outsider stories in time for the Oscars.
Should there be trains in Oz? My gut feeling is absolutely not, although it probably wouldn’t have bothered the nation’s original chronicler L. Frank Baum, who gave us Tik-Tok the clockwork man in Ozma Of Oz, the third volume in the saga. The sleek green train in Jon M. Chu’s Wicked is clockwork too, which is a nice touch, clouds of white steam emerging from its workings as it races past the windmills and poppy fields, carrying the gifted budding sorceress Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and her frenemy Galinda, also known as Glinda (Ariana Grande), to the Emerald City to see the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum). They’re travelling from Shiz University, which is on the opposite side of Oz from Munchkinland, so we needn’t ask why Dorothy and her friends had to walk. For all that, the train rankles. Perhaps it’s just the idea of an Oz story owing anything to Harry Potter.
There are other anomalies in Wicked, part one of a planned two-part adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same title, adapted in turn from Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life And Times Of the Wicked Witch Of the West. To cut a long story moderately short, Wicked in any form is officially a prequel to Baum’s original 1900 The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, which is out of copyright, rather than to the more widely beloved Wizard Of Oz movie, directed by Victor Fleming and others for MGM in 1939 and now confusingly owned by Warner Bros (Chu’s Wicked is a Universal release). This means, for example, that we’re given the origin story of the silver shoes Dorothy wore in Baum’s book, not of the immortal ruby slippers someone at MGM decided would look better in Technicolor. Just the same, the new film mimics the look of the old one as far as it legally can: if you’re doing an Oz musical, there really is only one template to work from.
Likewise, there can be no doubt which version of the Oz story inspired Maguire to write his own. Above all, it’s a question of colour—that is, the colour of Elphaba, Maguire’s name for the future Wicked Witch, who wasn’t green till 1939, when Margaret Hamilton played her. This change too presumably originated as a bid to get the most from the medium, but Maguire and his successive adapters have interpreted it differently: Wicked is so directly a story about racial prejudice it hardly qualifies as a parable. The new movie sharpens the point through the casting of Erivo, who is Black, unlike Idina Menzel who originated the role on Broadway in 2003 (and is otherwise known as the voice of the extremely white Elsa in Frozen). While stage Elphabas have come from a range of backgrounds, the choice here is plainly not a “colour-blind” one—even if Erivo’s green make-up also evokes the tendency of modern fantasy and SF cinema to render the ethnicity of actors literally invisible.
It’s true that Elphaba’s greenness wasn’t passed down from her ancestors in the usual sense. Rather, it’s an inherited mark of sin, her mother (Courtney Mae-Briggs) having been plied with a magical green elixir by her salesman lover while the head of the household (Andy Nyman) was off governing the Munchkins. There are questions you might want to ask about that, and also about the way a campaign against talking animals serves as a further metaphor for racism, a device carried over from Maguire’s book. As best we can judge, most such animals have always belonged to an informal Oz servant class, like the brown bear (Sharon D. Clarke) who was the young Elphaba’s beloved nanny (I almost wrote “mammy,” remembering Munchkinland is literally its nation’s South).
Nothing if not a layered text, Chu’s Wicked is in some ways so old-school it’s come round to being up-to-date, not least in its out-and-proud pride in being a full-blown musical (a far more elaborate one than the 1939 film, which had only a couple of big production numbers). Even without having seen the stage version, it’s clear how much Schwartz and his book writer Winnie Holzman took from Stephen Sondheim’s still more enduring revisionist fairy tale Into the Woods, including a handsome prince (Jonathan Bailey) who in the words of his Sondheim equivalent “was raised to be charming, not sincere”. It’s also clear that in the transition to the screen, Elphaba and Galinda’s adventures at Shiv have been systematically Harry-Potterised—which may explain how the movie manages to run over an hour longer than the 90-minute first act of the stage show, despite covering the same basic plot with no added songs.
Other templates are perhaps less conscious. If Wicked is understood in the terms not of the musical or fairy tale but of melodrama, we aren’t far from Douglas Sirk’s ferocious 1959 Imitation of Life, with Grande channelling the blonde perkiness of Sandra Dee and Erivo in the Susan Kohner role as her racially “mixed” counterpart. Naturally Wicked is nowhere near as blunt as Sirk’s masterpiece, as no Hollywood studio release of the 2020s could be. But the camouflage of fantasy still gives Chu and his team some freedom to venture into dangerous territory, while leaving us guessing how far Elphaba’s wickedness is destined to go. In part two, will she truly break bad, or remain a misunderstood victim—and will Dorothy truly bring about her watery doom, or will she be reconstituted in time for the curtain call? Oz is a land of magic, meaning that anything can be altered with the wave of a wand. But without an element of permanent tragedy, the story itself may be in danger of melting away.
If the forthcoming Wicked: For Good matches the running time of its predecessor, the whole epic will last a little over five hours, roughly two hours longer than the combined halves of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, designed to be shown back-to-back with an intermission. Both the first Wicked and The Brutalist are in the running for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars, with nine additional nominations apiece—and both aim to justify their length as slow-burn stories of mistreated outsiders whose simmering rage is very gradually brought to the boil, with ambiguous results.
The ambiguity starts with the films’ respective titles, which could apply to more than one character in each case. Corbet’s Hungarian-Jewish protagonist László Toth (Adrien Brody) is a Brutalist in the architectural sense, whose Bauhaus sense of form may have helped him to emerge from Buchenwald with at least a sliver of his former self intact (“I’m not what I expected,” he says with typical wry understatement). After some further misadventures—the film itself is not as streamlined as all that—he finds his way to Pennsylvania, where an eccentric industrialist named Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) commissions him to design an ambitious “community centre,” promising full creative control.
What could go wrong? There are a million possibilities, a few of them arising from factors such as László’s heroin habit, but most of them from the personality of Van Buren, revealed immediately as a pompous fool, later as something far worse. Even before the awful truth is out, Van Buren’s loyalty and generosity scarcely compensate for his self-involvement, pretension, and unpredictable temper—a mix of traits liable to ring bells for anyone involved with independent filmmaking, to the point where you might wonder if any of Corbet’s own former backers posed for the portrait.
Which doesn’t mean Corbet lacks pretensions in turn. Like the work of Paul Thomas Anderson and the younger American male directors who have followed in his wake, The Brutalist is about its pretension, swollen with it, yet simultaneously ready to burst its own bubble. Shot on 70mm like Anderson’s The Master, it’s self-consciously an epic-on-a-budget, masking yet glorying in how little we truly see of László’s work-in-progress. Often a handheld camera follows the characters from behind, as if they were clutching an invisible thread meant to lead us through the story: many types of images can be hung on this thread, from passages of pseudo-Soviet montage to extracts from a vintage stag film and an instructional short on the history of Pennsylvania, both of which Corbet likely secured the rights to for free.
In several ways The Master appears to be a touchstone for The Brutalist, set in the same era and centred on a comparable power struggle between two contrastingly damaged men (both films also feature memorable handjob scenes). But Van Buren remains a small-scale grotesque next to the version of L. Ron Hubbard played in The Master by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who gave us far more opportunity to enter into his character’s pain. The relationship between the central duo in The Brutalist is also less charged than its equivalent in The Master, at least on László’s side: there’s little sense that Van Buren’s sentimental attachment to his protégé is reciprocated, although whatever remains of Lászlo’s own sexuality is an open wound both before and after his reunion with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones, playing the most sympathetic character by a fair margin).
Looking back further, Corbet would no doubt like us to think that his real roots are in European art cinema—but as in Wicked, various classical Hollywood precursors are also visible. The scenes where László is first roped into going along with Van Buren’s plans have a touch of Sunset Boulevard, if Norma Desmond were really the bimbo Sunset Boulevard pretends to want us to think. Then for a while the film flirts with being The Fountainhead, before the penny drops that what we’ve really been watching all along is Land Of the Pharoahs, with László turning the tables on his oppressors by overseeing the construction of a gigantic tomb for someone else.
If much of The Brutalist is suffused with dread, this relates not only to László’s own possible fate, but to the prospect of him losing his humanity to the point of letting innocents be sacrificed to his grand design. Yet in practice our sympathy with the protagonist is no more threatened than in Wicked: even when a train crash suggests he’s recreated his wartime nightmare by osmosis, there are no fatalities, nor could he literally be blamed if there were. His actual bad behaviour is explained if not excused by the suffering he’s gone through, including the way he’s retraumatised by his monstrous American sponsor (what any of this might mean allegorically is unclear but worth pondering, as are the parallels with Oppenheimer, last year’s Oscar smash).
As it happens, Wicked has a grand design of its own near its heart, the unscrupulous Wizard’s bid to unify Oz via the construction of the Yellow Brick Road. But we’ll have to wait for the sequel to see how this plays out. Likewise, we’ll have to wait and see if the screen version of the Wicked story culminates in a traditional crowd-pleasing showdown, as The Brutalist effectively does, complete with a woman who stands by her man and a villain who gets his comeuppance. As if uneasy about this capitulation to convention, Corbet makes a point of wrong-footing us in other respects, leaving the ultimate fates of both Erzsébet and Van Buren to the imagination, and excluding László from the climax before having him resurface as a silent, almost ghostly figure decades on.
Still, there’s poised ambiguity, there’s not being sure what you want to say, and there’s blurring the lines sufficiently to let different audiences read in what meaning they choose. Any film that makes a showing at the Oscars is likely to have elements of all of these; similarly, while László is defined by his refusal to compromise, in another sense he’s been compromised all along, or at least from the moment he consented to a purportedly non-ideological project having a Christian chapel at its centre. Nor would Corbet dispute that his own career has entailed its share of such compromises, judging from the Italian disco track that closes the film, a variant on the traditional creed of anybody in the impossible position of a commercial filmmaker aspiring to art: “One for them, one for me.”