There is a great big, faceless hole at the center of Jon M. Chu’s Wicked: For Good, and her name is Dorothy Gale.
In tackling the recontextualization of the iconic The Wizard of Oz, Chu and his team opt to forego making Dorothy a real character within the narrative of Wicked: For Good, instead utilizing her as little more than set dressing and an obtuse mechanic of the plot. This was undoubtedly inspired by the on-stage iteration of Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s Wicked, which pulls a similar trick, keeping Dorothy confined in the wings, existing just-off-stage for the sum total of the play until she appears in silhouette at its climax to ‘melt’ Elphaba.
However, this is a root problem that traces all the way back to the earliest iterations of that 2003 show, and is only made infinitely worse by the film’s handling of the character, in which she is onscreen a fair amount but never developed or even properly visually revealed to the audience. A few months prior to the release of Wicked: For Good, Chu claimed this was out of reverence and respect for the character’s rich history, saying, “I didn’t want to step on who you think Dorothy is in whatever story that you came into this with. This is still Elphaba and Glinda’s journey, and she is a pawn in the middle of all of it.”
If you’ve seen Wicked: For Good, you know what a strange and dissonant statement this is, because the film turns Dorothy into the butt of the joke several times over, characterizing her as a country bumpkin who is incapable of making choices on her own and whose whining is critiqued by the main characters over and over again. But more than this, not having Dorothy function as an actual character within the film is indicative of a critical flaw within the very concept of Wicked as a larger story itself: if the whole appeal of Wicked is to present the audience with these alternative interpretations of these iconic characters and show how that changes the story we thought we knew, then it needs to actually show us how it changes the story.
Instead, Wicked plays very fast-and-loose with The Wizard of Oz story, especially once Dorothy comes crashing into it. Entire present-tense critical sequences, which one would assume would be essential and highly impactful to the characters of this story, are skipped over in favor of simply assuming the audience can fill in the blank with the relevant scene from The Wizard of Oz. However, this is done without taking into account how or why these characters in this story would act, and how they have been forged to be deliberately different from their original counterparts.
Why would this version of Glinda take the shoes off of Nessa’s feet (a woman who she knows, is the sister of her best friend, and didn’t want to harm in any actual way) and give them to Dorothy? Why would this version of the Scarecrow (a.k.a. Fiyero) merrily go along with Dorothy on her journey to Oz at all, given that he’s literally a fugitive of the city? After spending the whole film vehemently pledging to kill Elphaba, why does this version of the Tinman (a.k.a. Boq) drop out of the film entirely and never actually have any kind of resolution at all? And perhaps most importantly of all, why does this version of the Wizard even task Dorothy and her friends with bringing him Elphaba’s broom? He has all of his guards out hunting her; why do he and Madame Morrible believe this random twelve-year-old girl is going to be able to find her, much less execute her?
The answer is, of course, because all of these things happened in The Wizard of Oz, so they happen here. But the end result is the storytelling equivalent of spending hours hand-carving a square-shaped peg and then attempting to jam it into a round-shaped hole, over and over again for the full two-and-a-half-hour runtime of Wicked: For Good.
The whole appeal of this creative endeavor was to show audiences the side of the story they thought they knew through a new light, so why does the film turn its nose of up at delivering on this very concept, instead allowing it all to play out verbatim, predominantly off-screen as if nothing has changed at all? I’m inclined to grant the on-stage iteration a bit more leeway given its much more constricted runtime and the fact that there’s an inherently much higher suspension of disbelief to a stage play than there is to a movie. Having Dorothy exist solely in the literal periphery of the play isn’t a good choice, but it’s one I can at least see the utilitarian purpose behind. The Wicked films don’t have either of these things as excuses though. Splitting the play into two films afforded Chu and his team a runtime that is nearly double that of the play, and the cinematic medium allows them to have a much larger cast, a grander scope, and much more fully-realized sequences.
Instead, in adapting the play’s Act Two, which has been ridiculed for decades even by the most ardent of fans, they basically threw out the baby and kept the bathwater. This section of the story needed the most finessing if it was ever going to function as a cinematic work, much less one sectioned off from the strengths and high points of Act One. Instead, Chu and company seem to have quadrupled down on all of the worst elements of the play's second half, and Dorothy’s treatment in the film is a clear indication of this.
There’s a version of Wicked: For Good that delivers on the promise of this story in a much more satisfying fashion, making Dorothy an active player within the narrative and allowing her presence to escalate the tension and raise the stakes between Elphaba and Glinda in organic fashion, showing audiences a reinterpreted take on The Wizard of Oz. However, as it currently exists, Wicked: For Good treats her as little more than a superfluous punching bag, and it is all the worse for it.