Return To Oz

My thoughts on Jay Kelly and Wicked: For Good

In Jay Kelly, the new film from Noah Baumbach, George Clooney plays the title role, a character not too far removed from himself—a handsome and successful movie star who strives to be seen as an agreeably affable regular guy despite his wealth, power and being a regular target of the tabloids intent on following his every move. As the story begins, however, Jay has just complete his latest work and is feeling more at loose ends than usual for a number of reasons—his youngest daughter, Daisy (Grace Edwards), is preparing to go off to college, the famed director who gave him his big break (Jim Broadbent) has just passed away, shortly after Jay refused to reciprocate by declining to sign on to his latest project, and he has just had a nasty encounter with a former acting school pal (Billy Crudup) who believes that Jay essentially stole his career from him. With a few weeks of downtime until the start of his latest project, Jay impulsively decides to accept an Italian film festival’s career achievement prize and sets off for a European getaway that will also find him following around Daisy and her friends on their post-graduation trip, one marked by any number of flashbacks to key moments in his life that range from that first audition to his frayed relationship with his estranged elder daughter (Riley Keough). The hitch, of course, is that Jay, for all of his regular-guy posing, maintains an entourage—including his publicist (Laura Dern), stylist (Emily Mortimer, who co-wrote the script with Baumbach), bodyguard (Giovanni Zeqireya) and, most importantly, eternally loyal manager Ron (Adam Sandler)—and they are now obligated to put their own lives on hold and come along as well. As the trip goes on and the itinerary predictably goes haywire, it become increasingly evident that these handlers, despite their outward fondness for their employer, may be reaching the breaking point in regards to working with him—even the fiercely dedicated Ron, who was there at the very beginning but who may not make it to the end.

Although I have not been much of a fan of Baumbach’s brand of solipsistic cinema over the years, I thought that Marriage Story was a strong examination of the brutal aftermath of a seemingly amiable divorce and while I don’t think his adaptation of Don DeLiillo’s White Noise quite worked, it was at least an ambitious attempt at making something out of a book that had long been deemed impossible to do as a film. With Jay Kelly, however, not only has he reverted to his dubious previous form, he has somehow managed to make something even shallower than those earlier works. Although the basic premise may suggest a contemporary take on Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, it is one that is clearly long past its shelf life. The notion of Clooney playing a variation of himself sounds like a promising idea but the film does nothing with it. The film is too busy romanticizing and sentimentalizing him at every turn that there is virtually no conflict to be had as it plods along its familiar path—even the emotional conflicts with his daughters and his irascible father (Stacy Keach) are presented too genially for them to have any sort of emotional effect. Clooney himself is fine, I suppose, but the paces he goes through are so familiar that the whole thing begins to feel like a full-length variation of the airless awards tribute that the story is itself building towards, right down to the highlight reel of clips (taken from Clooney’s own filmography) and the number of famous faces who pop up in underwritten supporting parts along the way as a subliminal show of support. (Clooney fanatics will note that this is the first time that he and Laura Dern have appeared together in a film since the immortal Grizzly II: Revenge.) Oddly, the best thing about the film is Sandler, who is quite effective playing a manager trying to juggle attention-seeking clients (including another big actor played by Patrick Wilson) and the demands of his family (including wife Greta Gerwig) while still remaining a mensch in an industry where that particular quality is always in short supply. He finds just the right tone for the part and is so effective that after a while, I found myself wishing that Jay Kelly would push its nominal but largely uninteresting lead to the side and focus on him instead

As Wicked: For Good, the second half of Jon M. Chu’s super-elaborate adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical riff on The Wizard of Oz, begins, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), a.k.a. The Wicked Witch of the West, has learned that the seemingly powerful Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) is a fraud intent on exploiting her true powers and enslaving the talking animals of Oz to build a grand yellow brick road and is trying to get the word out to the people that they are being manipulated. Alas, the equally corrupt Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) fights back by creating a narrative that positions Elphaba as a danger to the land that includes positioning her one-time BFF, Glinda (Ariana Grande), as a symbol of all that is good and just, even though she lacks any actual magical abilities of her own. While Elphaba tries to do right by people who are increasingly turning against her, Glinda is torn between serving her land and her feelings for her friend, the latter becoming increasingly complicated when she enters into an arranged engagement with the hunky Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) despite his continued yearning for Elphaba. Things become increasingly complicated with the arrival of an outsider from a distant land who, although never quite seen full on at any point, will play a large part in their respective destinies as she goes on her own journey, picking up a few additional characters along the way whose identities I will leave for you to discover.

I wasn’t the hugest fan of last year’s Wicked, which covered the show’s first act, but it was still a reasonably entertaining work—although bloated and uneven in parts, it boasted strong performances from the two leads, a couple of interesting visuals here and there and the undeniable power of the instant classic “Defying Gravity.” And yet, even though it was obviously made at the same time with the same people on both sides of the camera, For Good stumbles so badly that you can hardly believe that the people in charge even saw it, let alone produced it. Like its predecessor, the material has been stretched out in order to justify turning it into two separate features but while the first film was sort of able to get away with that by spending more time introducing the characters and their surroundings, the attempts to get a second act that runs roughly an hour or so onstage to a 138-minute running time only succeed in making it all seem poky and bloated. The film valiantly attempts to serve as a warning of the dangers of fascism and falling for propaganda but only manages to do so in the most facile manner imaginable—one that rings particularly false when it comes in the service of a film with a promotional campaign that is so omnipresent that even Joseph Goebbels might have advised the producers to ease off a bit. Additionally, the moments in which the narrative tries to dovetail with that of The Wizard of Oz are handled in a particularly clumsy manner throughout.

As for the rest of the film, it is strangely choppy throughout, the visuals are more cloying than eye-catching and, with the sole exception of Elphaba’s barn-burner “No Good Deed,” none of the songs here are particularly memorable and the new tunes contributed by writer/composer Stephen Schwartz are both pointless and forgettable. The screenplay has an interesting idea in it in the form of Elphaba’s gradual realization that the only way to save Oz and its people is to essentially embrace the villainous role that has been assigned to her but it kind of pushes that aside for graceless production numbers, tedious special effects sequences and the sight of Yeoh, a wonderful actress who is unfortunately once again the weak link among the actors, planting her face in the same wedding cake not once, but twice. As before, the best things about For Good are the strong performances from the two leads, both of whom are able to sing the hell out of their parts while at the same time delivering effective acting turns as they chart the strange developments in the relationship between their characters. They deliver with all the power and emotion that one could hope for. It is just a shame that they are doing it in the service of a film that never quite justifies itself as anything other than a particularly blatant cash grab conclusion to a pair of films that would have been far more effective as one long movie—at least then, the clumsy stuff in the second act would have been offset by the good stuff in the first.