by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles came home last night just after 9 p.m., in time to
watch one of the dullest and most singularly unentertaining two hours of TV
we’ve ever subjected ourselves to: Emerald City, yet another attempt to rehash the characters and situations of Lyman
Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz and
his many sequelae into something that would “grab” modern audiences. NBC
Universal Television not only aired this atrocity but produced it, and they hired
someone they billed as “the visionary director Tarsem Singh” to direct all 10
of its limited-run episodes. Tarsem Singh is an [East] Indian director who made
his U.S. debut in 1991 (at age 30) doing the video for the R.E.M. song “Losing
My Religion,” and since then he’s made movies with titles like The
Cell (which imdb.com synopsized as, “An FBI
agent persuades a social worker, who is adept with a new experimental
technology, to enter the mind of a comatose serial killer in order to learn
where he has hidden his latest kidnap victim” — can you say The
Silence of the Lambs knockoff?), The
Fall, The Immortals and Mirror
Mirror. The opening episode, “The Beast
Forever,” was written by Matthew Arnold and Josh Friedman — L. Frank Baum is
credited only with creating the characters — and in their version Dorothy Gale
(Adria Arjona) is an adult woman (something that’s been done to Dorothy in at
least two previous Oz films, Larry Semon’s 1925 silent The Wizard of
Oz — in which Semon’s wife, Dorothy Dawn,
played her — and 1978’s The Wiz),
a nurse working in the town of Lucas, Kansas.
This Dorothy’s big ambitions are
to get into medical school and become a doctor (only sexism keeps getting in
her way) and to reconnect with her birth mother, who lives in a trailer on the
outside of town and has stayed out of her life since turning her over to her
Uncle Henry and Auntie Em (you remember) to raise. Only on the night she goes
to see her mom a cyclone came up (considerably more convincingly than the wind
sock they used for the classic 1939 film) and deposited her in a much less
friendly or welcoming Oz than the one Baum wrote and the 1939 film depicted.
(Before Dorothy leaves for Oz we hear a bit of a cheesy soft-rock song that
can’t help but fall behind the inevitable comparisons with “Over the Rainbow.”)
She’s blown to Oz not in a house but in a car, and when she arrives her car
runs down the Wicked Witch of the East (identified in the cast list only as
“East” and played, like her sister “West,” by a Black woman made up as much as
possible to resemble David Bowie’s wife Iman) — only instead of Munchkinland
she lands in something called “Freehold,” and instead of being glad that she’s
killed “East” they’re pissed at her because — as we find out about an hour
through this show’s two-hour running time — “East” had consigned a lot of
people into a magical prison that keeps them essentially drowning in quicksand
forever, neither sinking and dying nor being able to escape, and by killing the
witch Dorothy has removed the one person who would have known how to take the
spell off the unfortunate
prisoners. The tribal people (who come off more like an overenthusiastic bunch
of J. R. R. Tolkien Lord of the Rings re-enactors than anything else) tell Dorothy to leave or they’ll
execute her, and they send her out not on a yellow brick road, but a dirt road
that looks yellow only because
it’s covered in poppy pollen, which she’s solemnly instructed not to breathe.
Along the way she meets and frees, not a scarecrow, but Lucas (Oliver
Jackson-Cohen), a former knight in the Royal Guards of the Wizard of Oz
(Vincent D’Onofrio, whom Singh worked with before on The Cell but who — especially seeing him in his bearded
Wizard guise just a night after seeing him as Detective Robert Goren in a Law
and Order: Criminal Intent rerun — kept
making me think he was a well-disguised undercover cop busting a drug ring of
people using the Oz character identities for cover) who’s been badly wounded.
Dorothy uses her medical knowledge, and particularly information about herbs,
to bring Lucas to a semblance of life, only he’s poisoned by Mombi (Fiona
Shaw), which in the original books was the name of the Wicked Witch of the West
but here is a free-lance medicine woman who’s kept two young males imprisoned
in her home behind a thicket of bramble bushes which serve both to keep them
inside and others out. One of the boys Dorothy frees from Mombi’s spell is Tip
(Jordan Loughran), who in the movie’s best scene fulfills his destiny from the
Baum books and transitions into Princess Ozma … well, into a woman, anyway, and
I give Messrs. Arnold and Friedman big-time credit for using Baum’s pioneering
Transgender character (created, Baum’s biographers say, out of wish-fulfillment
because he wanted a daughter and all five of his real-life kids were boys).
Unfortunately, I don’t give them or their “visionary” director much credit for
anything else; the Los Angeles Times
reviewer thought this show owed more to Game of Thrones than The Wizard of Oz, and though we haven’t watched any episodes of Game
of Thrones (that’s what you get for
subscribing to basic cable only and missing the premium shows you have to pay
extra for — and which are so strewn about the “content” companies that if you
got the bright idea to “cut the cord,” cancel your cable service and watch TV
through the Internet instead, you’d probably end up spending more than your current cable bill if you signed up for
all the services that offered programs you actually wanted to watch), it did
seem to be drawing on it and also the Harry Potter books. One conceit is that the Wizard of Oz’s court
is sexually corrupt, and as a result the Wizard keeps trying to recruit women
staffers from Glinda’s (Joely Richardson) girls instead — only they keep
getting corrupted. The show goes wrong in virtually every conceivable way, including
a dank, dark green-and-brown overall look (except for a couple of scenes that
go instead for the steely-grey of the Underworld movies, a new one of which just came out in
theatres) that inevitably led me to joke, “I have a feeling we’re not in Technicolor
anymore!”
The acting is the stiff stand-and-recite stuff we’re all too used to
in fantasy movies, in which the poor players realize early on that they’re not
going to be able to create multidimensional characterizations because the
script isn’t going to let them. Singh’s direction is just dull, with far too
few action scenes that might provide an excuse for this movie’s existence, and
the script is so convoluted (a recurring problem with fantasies, especially
post-Tolkien) it’s virtually impossible to keep track of who is who, who’s
doing what to whom and what side they’re on. Charles, who recently downloaded
electronic versions of virtually all L. Frank Baum’s original Oz books and plowed through them, recognized some
elements from later post-Wizard
books in the series — including the mechanical drone, run by clockwork, that
spies on Dorothy and Lucas in a key early scene — and the film had some clever
steampunk gimmicks, including the authentic reconstructions of Alessandro
Volta’s original wet-cell batteries that provide electricity to the otherwise
quite dowdy dwelling of the Wizard. But for the most part it was just two hours
of dreary dullness, using Baum’s characters just for commercial appeal and
utterly failing to bring his world to life — especially since, as Charles
reminded me, Baum himself had been quite clear that his intent was to lighten
up the fairy-tale genre, to play
up the whimsy and humor and play down the grimness and gore it had inherited
from the Brothers Grimm and all those folk tales they’d collected from German
peasants. This show, which NBC aired just after the first episode in the final
season of their series Grimm (in
which a modern-day police department faced Grimm-like monsters and other
supernatural creatures), brought back in all the gloom and darkness Baum had
wanted to purge from his fairy
tale, and it doesn’t take long before you realize that the writers and director
aren’t interested in creating a
genuinely new and insightful version of the Oz tales (the way Gregory Maguire
was when he created the book — later the musical — Wicked) but simply exploiting the continuing commercial
appeal of Baum’s characters and using them for very different, and much
drearier, fictional purposes!
