AndrewBloom
8/10 5 years ago
[8.2/10] Conventional wisdom holds that stories should be held together by *but*s and *therefore*s instead of *and then*s. The idea is that each new scene, each beat in the story, should be motivated by what came before, either as a cause and effect or as a reactive shift, rather than a series of events that just sort of happen one after another. That tack is supposed to preserve weight and momentum in storytelling, giving the actions taken and the choices made meaning as a whole.
*Return to Oz* is very much an *and then* movie. The nearly half century-late sequel to the timeless classic *Wizard of Oz* does bring back the iconic Dorothy Gale and has her make key decisions here and there. But the film is more an accumulation of events that simply roll into one another than genuinely progress, and they often have little connective tissue between them beyond an overall sense of “this is simply what happens next.” It roundly violates those dearly-held storytelling principles, which should consign the film to the scrap heap of the languid or unsatisfying.
And yet that very sort of lack of a clear direction-- the ways in which Dorothy is more passenger than driver in this story and the film is more a series of cinematic cul de sacs than a propulsive tale -- fits what the movie is going for. *Return to Oz*, like its predecessor, represents the anxieties and concerns of childhood through the lens of a fantasy land. With that approach, the film maintains its own sort of dream logic, illustrating how our psyches are stretched and reflected back at us, in a fashion that could represent a journey through a magical place or through the knotted ends of a traumatized young girl’s psyche. Rarely do our fractured reveries and fears amount to cohesive narrative with a straightforward progression, and the film maintains that elliptical quality of a low-key nightmare without foothold for audience or subject to the end.
That’s what compelled me the most about the film. While *The Wizard of Oz* has some darker elements bubbling under the surface and some scary moments that sent me hiding under the covers as a kid, it is more broadly cheerful and colorful throughout. *Return to Oz* is the dark echo of its primogenitor -- a negative image that focuses more on a sense of desolation and disturbia in the aftermath of Dorothy’s trip back and forth over the rainbow. Gone are the songs. Gone is the technicolor splendor. Gone are the singing and dancing sidekicks.
In their place is a version of Oz that seems devoid of life and joy after the “Nome King” has conquered it and reduced its residents to stone statues and artifacts. Firmly present is a grimier, more down-to-earth aesthetic, that mutes most colors and shows our heroes wandering through a place that feels more like a decaying museum district than a thriving wonderland. And in the stead of the Scarecrow, the Tinman, and the Cowardly Lion are a series of broken toys and more haunted creations, who still joke and care and come to love Dorothy, but whose existences carry more of the feel of the bizarre, grotesque, and tragic than the clean and cuddly look of Buddy Ebsen and company.
Dorothy herself is played by eleven-year-old Fairuza Balk rather than seventeen-year-old Judy Garland, and she scans more clearly as a woebegotten-if-polite child than as a playacting teenager. That adds a sense of truth and menace to the events of *Return to Oz*. While there are tense moments in the 1939 classic, its version of Dorothy seems more capable, more adult, more assured even as a stranger in a strange land. For the 1985 sequel, this Dorothy is supposed to be more comfortable and familiar with Oz, even longing to return to it. And yet her more apparent tender age here makes the character seem more vulnerable, and the debilitating changes to the once-brilliant fantasyland make the place even more alien and more foreboding for her and the audience.
That sets the stage for the clearest theme of a film that is heavy with symbolism and, to be entirely frank, a little bewildering at times. In the real world, Dorothy is encouraged to forget her journey to Oz, chalked up to a delusion that may even call for the industrial horrors of electroshock treatment to wipe it away. The Nome King in Oz who, true to the 1939 predecessor’s approach, is played by the same actor who portrays the shock therapy physician in the real world, offers Dorothy the same bargain -- to leave Oz and all that she’s seen and known behind her. Preserving that, despite the pressure from grown-ups to set it aside, becomes Dorothy’s biggest aim and choice in the film, a metaphor for trauma and childhood writ large that uses a larger than life experience to translate a very human experience to the screen.
The film takes care to transcribe each of Dorothy’s earthly fears to Oz. The scary nurse who confines her to a room becomes a scary witch who locks her in a tower. The gurney that takes her to the perilous machine become the colorful but menacing “Wheelers” who become her henchman. And lights and gourds and decorations in her room become her unlikely allies in an adventure that lists as much inward as it expands outward. The film’s best asset, apart from the melancholy mood it strikes, is the production design, where *Star Wars* veterans Norman Reynolds and Fred Hole realize these ordinary figures and features from the real world through the heightening eyes of childhood, forging a place that’s renders Dorothy’s uncertainty, alienation, and longing, as well as the *The Wizard of Oz* managed to render the corresponding sense of childlike wonder and imagination.
It would be too much to call *Return to Oz* a hangout film. It is subtly grim, more steady than thrill-ridden, and full of creatures who seem to exist more for atmosphere or metaphor than character. Explanations are few, new players appear without warning or account, and the consequences of one move or the next owe more to the whims of fortune or fate than decision or agency.
And yet, as with Dorothy, it is hard to tear yourself away from this place. Its events are less important than the knotty feeling each frame seems to muster. The winding advance of its story seems less significant than the film’s baked in regrets for a world of simple wonder giving way to the industrial age. Its plot progression carries less weight than the supreme sense of being ripped from something to soon, trapped someplace known but now alien, and straining to hang onto the warmth and technicolor that first brought you into this particular fold.
There’s little room for *therefore* in *Return to Oz* or the once merry old land that bears the title. But that seems to be the point of the film, a wandering but wistful series of *and then*s that pull you, and Dorothy, to the end until Oz once again becomes a reverie you’re never sure you’ll get back to.
