Wicked: For Good Lands the Broom With a Playbill-Perfect Ending

How on earth are they going to make an entire movie out of Wicked Act Two? It’s the great mystery, the ever-present threat, the sword of Damocles that has hung over the entire Wicked movie enterprise ever since Universal first announced that its adaptation of Stephen Schwartz’s beloved Broadway musical would be divided into two separate films. Wicked’s first act has almost all of the show’s most famous, sing-along-able songs in it: “The Wizard and I,” “What Is This Feeling?” “Dancing Through Life,” “Popular,” and the legendary Act One closer that so easily translated to a big blockbuster-movie climax, “Defying Gravity.” Act Two is a trickier, sloppier, less hummable affair. The main characters are estranged from each other for most of it. It is plot heavy, with its semi-ridiculous “fractured fairy tale” retelling of The Wizard of Oz. And most of the songs just aren’t as pop-u-ler … lar.

While watching Wicked: For Good one year after the release of the charming first film, I found my doubts largely justified. The movie is both all over the place and slug paced, with chase scenes through confusing CGI backdrops, un-intriguing palace intrigue, and songs that start and stop in ways that kill all the momentum. I got the feeling that, counterintuitively, the only way to make a good Wicked movie was to split it into two parts, cutting Act Two off like a tumor so as not to taint part one. These were the ungenerous thoughts running through my head until the final 20 or so minutes, when the movie trains its focus on Glinda and Elphaba reuniting and departing one last time. This final leg of the journey is a bumpy descent, but it lands the broom with what I think is an ending so legitimately perfect that it feels inevitable. There is no other image this movie could have left us with: a faithful re-creation of the iconic Broadway poster!

In the lead-up to that moment, the following wild and crazy (but unlike the rest of the movie, well-paced and dramatically necessary) things happen: Glinda dons a billowing black cloak and Elphaba’s boots from the first movie (which she had saved in her closet on a pedestal — kinda gay!), steals Fiyero’s horse, and gallops off to the castle where Elphaba is hiding and where a mob is headed to kill her. Elphaba traps Dorothy in a dungeon. Glinda and Elphaba sing the title song at each other in extreme, emotional close-up, harmonizing like they share a soul. Elphaba fakes her own death. Glinda, radicalized by Elphaba’s sacrifice and goodliness, returns to the Emerald City, banishes the bad guys, and becomes a benevolent and righteous dictator for all of Oz. The opening scene of the first movie begins all over again, recontextualized with meaning from the past, like, five combined hours of cinema. A cow and a koala come out of hiding. Fiyero reveals that he is alive and also a scarecrow, one who kind of looks like Bicentennial Man. Elphaba and Fi-scare-cro leave Oz altogether and end up in what can only be described as Arrakis. Elphaba sees a rainbow (a sign from Glinda?), while the Grimmerie begins to open for Glinda (a sign from Elphaba?).

And then! The film cuts to a gauzy close-up from the characters’ school days, showing Elphie and Glinda in a field of poppies. Elphaba is on the left in her witch hat; Glinda is on the right in a big white-knit hood. They’re smiling and sharing a moment, and then Glinda turns to face Elphaba, puts a conspiratorial hand up to hide her mouth from us, and whispers something that we will never know into her bestie’s ear, just like the poster and the Playbill.

It’s a beautiful bit of fan service, and it made me feel the way I imagine comic-book fans feel when they see Chris Hemsworth hold a big mallet or whatever. It may seem like an obvious ending, but it took me by surprise because of how small and simple it is after over two hours of CGI chaos. It works because it slows down a clock tick to focus on just Elphaba and Glinda’s relationship. No world-building, no plottiness, no overexplaining, no spectacle. The friendship between these two witches is the core of this whole story, and the way that Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande perform it is what made the first movie work, despite the all-surrounding kookiness of Wicked. The second movie has precious few scenes in which the two are together, and in one of them, most of the air in the room is taken up by Jeff Goldblum. This final moment reminded me of why I liked the first Wicked movie so much, by drawing this movie’s focus back to what matters.

And lest the moment lean too cloying or sentimental, this shot’s earnestness is undercut with a playful wink. After all, this exact pose was a source of controversy in the lead-up to Wicked last year, when Erivo completely overreacted to fans editing the movie poster to look more like the Broadway version, going so far as to call it “the wildest, most offensive thing I have ever seen.” After all of that hubbub, here she is, re-creating the shot, serving fans what they wanted all along! This final frame represents an olive branch between artists and fans, something sweet and trolling in equal measure.