In every iteration – best-selling novel, hit Broadway show, now a movie that’s really only half a movie – Wicked It is about the failure of the “good witch” Glinda. Of course, Wicked is about many things, including bigotry, the rise of fascism, and a woman who discovers she has a voice after a lifetime of obeying orders to keep quiet. There’s even a love story in there. But look at any of these topics, and you’ll find Glinda in the middle of them, failing in major and minor ways.

She fails herself, her university, and her country, but she especially fails her rival, roommate, and eventual friend Elphaba. In the new film adaptation of Act I of the Broadway show, one of the ways Elphaba fails caught my attention in a way it never has on stage.

The film – technically Villain: Part 1 – is almost as long as the entire Broadway show (intermission and all), because director Jon M. Chu wanted to expand on Elphaba’s story and make her a more believable and well-rounded character. So the film shows her more as a baby, rejected by her parents and raised by a bear nanny, and as a young child, facing bullies and resisting her father’s disgust and disapproval. The explanation for her disdain is the same in the Broadway show and the film: once Elphaba and Glinda form a tentative friendship, Elphaba admits that her father hates her because it’s her fault that her mother is dead and that her sister Nessarose is a woman with paraplegia.

For what? Because Elphaba was born with green skin and her father was so paranoid about the pattern repeating itself with his second daughter that he forced his wife to constantly chew milk flowers while she was pregnant. The flowers, intended to give his second child lighter skin, poisoned his wife, who died during pregnancy, and “brought Nessa home too soon, with her little legs all tangled up.” Since then, Nessarose has used a wheelchair.

And Glinda, faced with this clear evidence that Elphaba’s father is a monster and that Elphaba herself has dealt with familial abuse, survivor’s guilt, and misplaced shame her entire life, chirps, “C “It was the milk flowers’ fault, not yours!”

In the stage show, this moment passes in a quick second, just another small piece of evidence that even in her best intentions, Glinda is still shallow and naive. In the film version, however, Elphaba is intentionally more of a realized person, and Cynthia Erivo gives her a haunted, wounded dignity that Chu zooms in on again and again. When she tells this story, it has seriousness and weight. It’s a narrative she played over and over in her mind and allowed to define her as a person. It’s not just that her father blames her for these things – she sincerely believes them herself.

And in this scene, Ariana Grande as Glinda takes in Elphaba’s confession with obvious sympathy and horror written all over her face. She pauses, takes a breath, looks for a way to comfort her new friend, and always comes out with that mundane little blessing. It’s still just a quick exchange in the middle of a spectacle film, but there’s so much more, well, gravity in the film. And in an interpretation of Wicked which is intended to make its characters seem a little more like real people, it seems even more ridiculous of Glinda to miss the point.

Elphaba’s life was radically shaped by intolerance and cruelty, not by flowers that failed to do their job. But she was forcefully taught to blame herself for her father’s choices, as if he couldn’t help but reject his eldest daughter for her skin color, but also couldn’t help but fatally poison his wife and permanently harm his other child. And the best Glinda can do is suggest that she should blame the poison, not the poisoner.

Chu Wicked is not well-positioned to deal with Elphaba’s increased pain, nor to give her a moment of realization of how her father’s account of her flaws has also harmed her. The storyline of the show and film moves beyond this moment and moves, so to speak, to greener pastures. (Act II doesn’t mention this either, aside from a brief note that Elphaba was never able to reconcile with her father. Perhaps Stephen Sondheim’s story planned new songs for Villain: Part 2 can unpack this aspect of the story: if he’s looking for suggestions, let me offer the titles “God, I Really Need Therapy” and “I Finally Realized My Dad Was Really Sucky .”)

Arguably, Elphaba deciding to fight the wizard (Jeff Goldblum) is a symbolic way of fighting against her father – especially after he pushed her particular buttons in “A Sentimental Man” by suggesting he wanted to be his father figure. And she probably thinks most of her father in “Defying Gravity,” when she sings, “Too long, I’ve been afraid of losing love, I guess I’ve lost / Well, if that’s it l ‘love, it costs way too much.’ Perhaps the fact that she never really accepts her father’s blame game is an important emotional moment.

But for Glinda, this moment feels like a turning point in the film. It’s a sign that she will never really understand. There is simply no room in his worldview for a scenario in which people are as cruel as Frex, Elphaba’s father, or in which people define themselves around stories that are outright lies. . She doesn’t know Frex and doesn’t hide from him or try to let him get away with it. She sincerely tries to help, but it never occurs to her to question Frex’s story, his motives, or her own guilt.

And maybe it’s because she shares his point of view. Considering how she treats Elphaba from the moment they meet, as if having green skin defines her and makes her monstrous, it seems pretty likely that she understands where Frex was coming from. Of course, he would be ready to poison his wife so as not to have two green children! It’s not that she justifies her bigotry to Elphaba, it’s just that she doesn’t question it, seeing how it led to a horrible and fatal situation. Because that would also make him question himself.

The whole scene is a key to how Glinda thinks. She lives in a carefully curated world where no one is evil and no action is wrong, especially her own. It’s just that sometimes bad things happen for no reason. This attitude makes her particularly incapable of facing the wizard and Madame Morrible.

There is no sign in this film – or in the rest of the play, as the story concludes – that Glinda truly understands why propaganda is dangerous, or accepts that helping to spread it herself is a bad choice that hurts people needlessly. Even when she is malicious, she sees no malice. And that’s because she never really seems to look beyond the surface of a situation, and nastiness – at least, big, life-changing nastiness – is so often presented beneath the surface of a lie much prettier.

It is perhaps a reading of Wicked this allows Glinda to escape a little for the choices that remain to come Villain: Part 2but this is the reading that the exchange of milk flowers gives us. She is still responsible for her choices, and for what those choices are to do to Elphaba and Oz. Refusing to look beyond the surface — dance through lifeas Fiyero says, is a choice just as much as his choice not to join Elphaba on the broom during “Defying Gravity” and all the choices that follow it.

But it’s fascinating to see such a small and brief exchange become such an incomprehensible and symbolic moment in the film version, such a foreshadowing of bigger things to come in the story. In a show story that relies so much on big, bold statements of secret desires And public intentionsChu’s version of Wicked – and Erivo and Grande’s choices as actors – always make this little exchange feel meaningful, moving and infuriating.

“It was your father’s fault, not yours!” was there, Glinda. And what a different story it would have been if Glinda or Elphaba were able to see through this particular lie and call him selfish, hateful, and more cowardly than the Cowardly Lion ever was.