Movie review: Support your local wizard in 'Oz, the Great and Powerful'

When I learned that Disney had given one of their most beloved franchises for director Sam Raimi to traipse around in, my reaction was: you mean the guy who made his career out of splicing together comedy and the grotesque with the “Evil Dead” series?  

 

Let me say that I have precious memories of chillaxing to any of those films, many of them in the dead of night, beer or blunt in hand, ruminating how Bruce Campbell can still manage to be droll despite the tortures of the supernatural. 

 

Oh, sure Raimi’s been working up to this with the “Spider-Man” flicks, but superheroes are a far cry from children’s PG movies. And with this one clocking in at two hours and seven minutes, you may want to rethink bringing your preteen kids to the theater. 

 

“Oz, The Great and Powerful,” being a prequel and origin story of how the wizard came to be THE wizard, Raimi and crew were given carte blanche to rework and reimagine the many aspects of Americana that suffused L. Frank Baum's books.   

 

This is an Oz where the CGI is used to the hilt with a live-action cast that's gotten plenty of Oscar wins. James Franco stars as the titular wizard, a carnival magician named Oscar Diggs working in a small-time circus in a dustbowl Kansas zip code. Not only is he non-magical, he’s also got dubious ethics. 

 

In the opening we see him treating his barker cum aide (a top-hatted Zach Braff) with little more than disdain, and seducing his newest “lovely assistant” with the same music box routine he's employed on all the female employees to get them out of their knickers. Of course, this being a Disney film, there are no knicker shots (in fact all the attractive witches wear leggings under their robes—for modesty, I presume) and only chaste kissing.  

 

Oz escapes a carny beating via hot air balloon and enters a tornado, then ends up in Oz. He thinks he's hit the jackpot-fame and fortune when he meets the very lovely witch Theodora (Mila Kunis in Jim Morrison-worthy leather pants) and she tells him about the prophecy. Said foretelling being a man of awesome power will come down from the sky to kill the Wicked Witch and bring peace to the land. And, oh, did she mention this wizard also gets to be king with attendant privileges and wealth?  

 

The two other witches are Theodora's sister Evanora (Rachel Weisz) and Glinda (Michelle Williams). Neither of them is convinced Oz is the wizard everyone's been expecting, but he makes a good case with his willingness to venture forth to kill the Wicked Witch, even as the good and the evil people here are revealed as their opposite. 

It'd be nearly impossible to give you a spoiler-free review if you're even slightly familiar with the basic tenets of Baum's fable, so let me enumerate the differences as subtly as I can: the lion, the scarecrow, and the tin man all kind of (sort of) make an appearance and figure at crucial moments of the plot—but not in the way you'd ever expect; the three witches reflect, rather than totally embody, templates of womanhood in mythic fabulation (more on this later); the Munchkins are alive and well; there's no Dorothy Gale and ergo, no Toto.

 

The comedy here is snarky, clever Raimi rather than the innocent-comes-to-town, wide-eyed adventure that'd be familiar in any of the adaptations on-screen, on celluloid, or stage. Mostly they're courtesy of Finley the monkey (also voiced by Braff) and the spunky Little China Girl who's really made out of porcelain china. Feisty yet fragile, get it?

 

Fortunately, the core geography of Oz is still intact. There's the Yellow-Brick Road, the Emerald City, and the requisite creepy Dark Forest—complete with portentous talking crows. The benchmark Oz film that laid out these topographic visuals is still the 1939 Judy Garland starrer. I, however, grew up to Fairuza Balk's (“The Craft”) 1985 “Return to Oz” thanks to RPN-9's reruns in the 90s. 

 

What I can tell you about without any sort of narrative ruination is the man who would be wizard, aka Oscar Diggs, aka Oz the G and the P. “I don't want to be a good man. I want to be a great one!” expresses Oscar Diggs in foreshadowing back at the circus.   

 

Oz stands in for the trifecta of characters that surrounded the original Dorothy with their lack of heart, courage, and brains. As he organizes the fight to retake the land he sheds the dross of greed and ambition, his recklessness, his cowardice. He acquires sympathy, courage, and strategic thought as he makes do with limited resources and an army that can't kill. 

 

This is how Oscar the man becomes Oz the wizard: sleight-of-hand. This way he makes the people believe that he's powerful simply by seeming that he IS. 

 

Vague? Don't worry. If you're an adult watching this you'll see the bait and switch coming a mile away. Familiar with The Block Hustle? Oz employs a variation thereof with three teams and capitalizes on the fact that the land has never seen modern tech in action; or as modern as tech gets in the early 1900s Kansas carny world.     

 

There's Hollywood production dazzle here that'll hopefully keep your own munchkins (read: progeny) in their seat what with colorful palettes and off-kilter visuals from the pretzel hair of the Oz citizens to the razzle dazzle witch battles. Really though, there's enough adult thrills here that make for a subversive alterna-fable making. 

 

Listen: the three witches are a facet of the maiden, mother, and crone template at given points in the plotline. And there's a great scene where one of these beauties (all the women actors in this movie make the best of what are essentially caricatures, but Rachel Weisz's Evanora stands out as applause-worthy) is corrupted with jealousy and hate, transforming her into a green-skinned Crone with wart.  

 

Thing is, several of the movie's attempts at grand illusion fall short of the mark, the biggest culprit being James Franco himself. His Oz is too meta, too self-aware, and winkingly deprecating that it stands out like a gossamer thread in a levitation act. You can choose to ignore this since the story pacing will carry the day, but it's relatively more than a minor problem since he's in 90 percent of the scenes. Whenever he fake-real smiles it's like white lint on a thespian black dress.         

 

For my money though, the process of how Oz transforms himself into a better man is worth sitting through. And in 3D that alchemy is really what magic is. —KG, GMA News

 

"Oz, the Great and Powerful" is currently screening in theaters. 

 

Photos courtesy of Walt Disney Studios