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| Franco shows Kunis the way in Oz the Great and Powerful. |
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Oz the Great and Powerful. Written by
Mitchell Kapner & David Lindsay-Abaire, based on the novels by L. Frank
Baum. Directed by Sam Raimi.
Maybe
I need a brain, but I like Sam Raimi’s Oz
the Great and Powerful. And apparently so do audiences, who gave it a
crushing victory over Jack the Giant
Slayer in last week’s fable-on-fable duel at the box office.
L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) wrote 17
books set in his fantasy world of Oz, so you’d think his work would be a prime
candidate to become a Hollywood franchise. Trouble is, Baum’s books no longer
present the definitive version of their own universe. Instead, multiple
generations of kids grew up watching the 1939 Victor Fleming adaptation of just
one of his books, The Wizard of Oz—on
TV, usually around Thanksgiving time. Now Oz is synonymous with Dorothy, ruby
slippers and cowardly lions, regardless of the fact that Baum created dozens of
other memorable heroines and villains. Try a Baum reboot and you invite the
wrath of millions of fanatical fans, ready to lay waste to sacrilege as utterly
as a swarm of flying monkeys.
Until now, the only reimagining of the
Baum universe that has seen serious traction is Stephen Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995), the bestselling novel that gave rise to a Broadway
musical. Maguire’s decidedly womynish take on the back story of the Wicked
Witch, Glinda, and the Wizard seems to have primed some of our feminist sisters
to expect something similar of Raimi’s film (see, for instance, here: jezebel.com/5989268).
But of course, there was nothing particularly feminist about the 1939 movie. True,
L. Frank Baum himself had convincing suffragist credentials. But as we already
have established, Oz belongs to Judy Garland now, not Baum.
Instead, Great and Powerful offers the origin story of the Wizard himself,
aka Oscar Zoroaster
Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkel Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs (James Franco). We meet him
first here as a two-bit carnival showman in 1905 Kansas, bilking audiences out
of coin with his low-rent spectacles. He’s also something of a womanizer, which
gets him in trouble with the circus strong man (Tim Holmes). Lighting out for
safer pastures, he flies his balloon into the path of a plains twister—and ends
up you-know-where.
He
finds an Oz as politically polarized as the 113th US Congress. The
three resident witches, sisters Theodora (Mila Kunis), Evanora (Rachel Weisz)
and Glinda (Michelle Williams) are locked in a death struggle over control of
Emerald City, each accusing the other of poisoning their father. More out of
hope than evidence of his magic skills, they take the stranger as a great
wizard, savior of the kingdom. After seeing the Emerald City’s treasury (lots of
gold but, alas, no emeralds…), Oscar is in no hurry to correct them. Theodora
in particular falls pretty hard for Oscar’s smooth carnival patter—with wicked
consequences for all.
With
its three powerful women executives aching for a man to come and settle their
troubles, this fairy tale is admittedly a disaster from a feminist perspective.
No doubt, Great and Powerful plays
into certain modern anxieties of the post-feminist culturescape—namely, the
fear that women’s empowerment, despite its power suits and sensible shoes, just
isn’t satisfying enough. Indeed, how else to explain the continued existence of
Cosmopolitan magazine, or the success
of Fifty Shades of Grey? If you bet
whether many successful women out there—if not witches, exactly—would give it
all up for Franco’s kind of handsome, shit-eating grin, you’d win that wager.
Dig a
little deeper, however, and the news isn’t all bad for feminists. After all, if
the witches’ attraction to Oscar represents some repressed desire for male
control, then it’s a pretty weak version of patriarchal power. Smoke and
mirrors, actually—the kind that the heavenly Michelle Williams, as the good
witch Glinda, winks at and permits to
exist.
But
the most inconvenient truth is that we need Raimi’s phallocentric story now more than we need another Tangled, Brave or similar tale of girls’
empowerment. Newsflash: there’s no shortage of strong, plucky heroines in Hollywood
anymore. Quite the opposite, girls kick butt just about every mainstream
fantasy these days, big screen or small. Meanwhile, one big question remains
unanswered after the feminist revolution: what does it really mean to be a man today, if the traditional models of
protector and provider have become not just outmoded, but offensive? In Great and Powerful, we see Oscar learn
that becoming a man isn’t about being great and powerful at all, but instead something
very basic, yet ultimately more fulfilling. It’s a story that the current
generation of young males, who are disconnected and restive and falling behind
their sisters in virtually every measure of educational achievement, need to
hear.
Not
that kids need to be consciously aware of any of this. Refreshingly, Raimi (Evil Dead, Army of Darkness, Drag Me to
Hell) eschews cynical
Dreamworks-style triangulation between adults and kids. There’s no smug double
entendre in the script by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire, no knowing
cultural references meant to bemuse hipsters and sail over the heads of
children (aside from allusions to the 1939 movie, of course…). This a kid’s
movie that is happy to be just that. And that’s not nothing.
© 2013
Nicholas Nicastro
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