Return to Oz Picks Mood and Metaphor over Plot and Progression on the Darker Side of the Rainbow

Conventional wisdom holds that stories should be held together by “but”s and “therefore”s instead of “and then”s. Each new scene, each beat in the narrative, should be motivated by what came before, either as cause and effect or as a change and reaction, rather than a random series of events. That approach is supposed to preserve the weight and momentum of your story, giving the actions taken and the choices made more meaning within a greater whole.

Return to Oz, however, is squarely an “and then” movie. As I discussed on the We Love to Watch Podcast, the nearly-half century late sequel to The Wizard of Oz brings back the iconic Dorothy Gale, and it shows her making a few key decisions here and there. But the film is mainly an accumulation of events that simply roll into one another, with minimal connective tissue between them. It roundly violates those dearly-held storytelling principles, which should consign it 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 a story that’s as much a series of cinematic cul de sacs as it is a propulsive tale — fits with the film’s aims and its mood. Return to Oz, like its predecessor, represents the anxieties and concerns of childhood through the lens of a fantasy land. It uses that roundabout unspooling of its narrative to maintain a sort of dream logic, illustrating how our psyches are stretched and reflected back at us, in a way that doubles as both a journey through a magical realm and through the knotted ends of a traumatized young girl’s psyche. Rarely do our fractured reveries and fears amount to cohesive narrative with an A-to-B plot. The film preserves that elliptical quality, like a low-key nightmare without a foothold for its main character or audience, from beginning to end.

That’s what’s most compelling about the film. While The Wizard of Oz had some darker elements bubbling under the surface and some scary moments that sent me hiding under the covers as a kid, it’s a more broadly cheerful and colorful film. 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.

"Is it just me or has this Village People reunion gotten a little esoteric?"

Gone are the songs, the chipper sidekicks, the technicolor splendor. In their place is a version of Oz that seems devoid of life and splendor after the unnerving Nome King has conquered it and transformed its residents into stone statues and trinkets. Firmly present is a grimier, more down-to-earth aesthetic, that mutes most colors and shows our heroes wandering through a landscape that feels more like a series of decaying museums than a thriving wonderland. And in the stead of the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion are a series of broken toys and more haunted creations, who still joke and care and come to love our heroine, 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 woe begotten-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, and more assured, even as a stranger in a strange land, than her latter day counterpart. In the 1985 sequel, Dorothy is supposed to be much more comfortable and familiar with Oz, even longing to return to it. And yet her more apparent tender age makes the character seem more vulnerable, and the debilitating changes to the once-brilliant fantasyland make the place seem that much more alien and foreboding through her perspective.

That sets 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, one cast by the grown-ups in her life as a delusion that might call for the industrial horrors of electroshock treatment to wipe it all away. In Oz, the Nome King (who, true to the prior film’s approach, is played by the same actor who plays Dorothy’s shock-advocating doctor in the real world) offers her the same bargain — to leave Oz and all that she’s seen and known behind her. Preserving her experiences, despite the pressure from adults to set it aside, becomes Dorothy’s animating purpose and the basis of her biggest choices in the film. Her path becomes a metaphor for trauma and for childhood writ large, that uses a larger-than-life experience to translate a very human one to the screen.

The film takes care to transmute each of Dorothy’s earthly fears into more dark yet whimsical ones within Oz. The scary nurse who confines her to a room becomes the scary witch who locks her in a tower. The gurney that takes young Dorothy to the perilous machine becomes the colorful but menacing “Wheelers” that are the witch’s henchman. And lights and gourds and decorations in her room become her unlikely allies in an adventure that burrows as deep inward as it expands outward. The film’s best asset, apart from the melancholy tone it preserves throughout, is the production design that makes this all visceral. 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 original The Wizard of Oz managed to convey the corresponding sense of childlike wonder and imagination.

"This is the water, and this is the well..."

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 symbolism than as characters. It carries the tone of one of those “the Rugrats were dead the whole time” fan theories. 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 to choice or agency.

Still, as with Dorothy herself, it is hard to tear yourself away from this place. The film’s 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 simpler wonders that’s slowly 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 comforting fold.

There’s little room for “therefore” in Return to Oz, or the once-merry old land that bears its name. 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 be able to get back to.