Review: Wandavision is bold, ambitious and deeply frustrating

 

Spoilers for the entirety of Wandavision

This week saw the season finale of Wandavision, the first installment in Marvel Studios' ambitious new foray into television and Disney's next step toward world domination.

It's telling how much the landscape of television has changed when 'Direct to TV' is no longer an embarrassing admission of dismal quality but a viable and exciting business model that behemoths like Disney and Warner Brothers are pursuing. Marvel is going all in with these projects, calling in their A list stars and creatives and throwing Hollywood money into the mix to expand their 'Cinematic Universe'. ABC's Inhumans is a distant, awful memory.

The upcoming The Falcon and The Winter Soldier was initially set to kick this off but Covid forced a reshuffle and so the far more intriguing Wandavision was bumped up. I say far more intriguing because this looked weird. Wanda was living it up in what appeared to be series of TV sitcoms with a very alive Vision. How Vision had been resurrected post Infinity War and why they were in a TV show was a mystery. Everything pointed to Marvel using this new format to give us a mind bending and riskier new installment in this thirteen(!) year old franchise.

So did the show the deliver? Yes and No.

The series starts strongly, getting a lot of mileage out of the Twilight Zone-esque idea of two people living in a television show. Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany are having the time of their lives as Wanda and Vision, getting to ham it up in a way that would be impossible outside this concept. The showrunners clearly loved creating these scenes and they admirably and affectionately parody the tone and aesthetic of the American sitcom through the eras (a montage of Vision growing from robot baby to robot teen had me howling). This is the show at its best; funny, charming and occasionally creepy. We get glimpses behind the curtain and it gradually becomes apparent there is something very wrong with the town of Westview and it's residents. There are times when the show arguably has too much fun and the device begins to feel like padding at best, wheel spinning at worst (a magic show segment lasts eighteen hours) but there is enough intrigue there to keep us entertained and engaged while we wait for the other shoe to drop.

The other shoe comes in the form of S.W.O.R.D. a government organisation and apparent successor to S.H.I.E.L.D. and it's here that the wheels start to fall off. The show introduces Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) and reintroduces Jimmy Woo and Darcy Lewis (Randall Parker and Kat Dennings, reprising their roles from Ant-Man and Thor). They are part of S.W.O.R.D.'s investigation into why an entire town can no longer be accessed and why two former Avengers are at the centre of it. The director considers Wanda a threat to be dealt with while our heroes see her as as much as a prisoner as the rest of the town. Tensions rise, the situation escalates and eventually the trio take things into their own hands. The issue here is... Wanda is dangerous. She is extremely dangerous.

This is the fatal flaw with Wandavision; the show refuses to commit to its central idea. In her grief Wanda has snapped and essentially taken an entire town hostage. S.W.O.R.D. is dispatched to investigate and try and essentially free everyone. The divisions director Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg) wants to forcibly extract Wanda to the horror of Rambeau, Woo and Lewis who do everything to get around him ans S.W.O.R.D. They never second guess themselves, they never consider the civilians living under mind control and they never waver in their belief that Wanda is a victim in need of rescue. That's fine, but the show is constantly showing the opposite. What's even more baffling is that despite not wanting to paint Wanda in too much of a villainous light it seems to go out of it's way to stress how nightmarish the town's plight is. Rather than simply being held in these odd 'TV' characters they are apparently in physical pain, and when the sleep, they live through Wanda's nightmares. This isn't secret information kept from our team, Rambeau herself experiences this and describes it to Hayward. Yet still Hayward is portrayed as the sinister government agent thwarting our heroes. The whole thing makes our plucky trio seem incredibly naive and paints the show's 'antagonist' as down right reasonable. 

I would be able to suspend my disbelief if any of the three characters had any relationship with Wanda but there is nothing there. This would work if they had brought Jeremy Renner in as Hawkeye. He had a relationship with her and has a sizeable rebellious streak, but Monica and crew don't have that connection. They simply appear so starstruck that any notion of helping the townspeople comes second to Wanda's well being. 

This is the show having it's cake and trying to eat it too. The Wanda Maximoff of the comics is famous for succumbing to madness and wreaking absolute havoc. Marvel Studios wants to do that storyline but doesn't have the conviction to let Wanda be a villain, even temporarily. It's that resistance to really exploring the idea and pushing the concept that hurts the show and even muddies how we are supposed to perceive her mind state. At what point is she fully aware of what she has done? When she starts to grasp what has happened what right does she have to keep hold of the town and keep Vision in the dark?

These are the questions the show hints at but won't tackle for fear of turning us against Wanda. They come agonisingly close which just makes it more frustrating. In one fantastic sequence Vision confronts Wanda and outright demands she face and explain her actions but it's abruptly interrupted.

The dramatic potential of confronting the morality of Wanda's actions keeps getting teased then dropped with Rambeau and crew stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the thousands of people being tortured and Hayward gradually being reduced to moustache twirling (it's revealed that he was trying to resurrect Vision himself. Why? I don't really know, but he is arrested and taken away in a police van like a Scooby Doo villain so it must have been heinous). It's such a missed opportunity. Why not have Monica confront the fact that Wanda is dangerous? Why not make the argument that Hayward and Monica are both right? On the one hand, yes, trying to drone strike an Avenger probably isn't the way to go but on the other why wouldn't the authorities be moving heaven and earth to detain Wanda Maximoff? This seems like such an obvious line to follow and it's just plain weird to leave it on the table.

Then there's Kathryn Hahn's Agnes. Perhaps it was a little unrealistic to expect Wanda to be the outright villain but it might have been more interesting than what we got. "It was Agatha All Along" was cute but what did Agatha actually do? She killed a imaginary dog? Is that worse than enslaving a town?  She even frees them at the end! We shouldn't be nodding in agreement with the 'villains' and be baffled by the actions of the heroes. Too often in the climax it feels like Agnes was included just to distract from Wanda's antics and justify a flashy battle. 

Despite that tirade I actually enjoyed most of Wandavision. It isn't bad by any stretch. Iron Fist was bad. It isn't bad but it doesn't capitalise on its clever premise in any satisfying way. I daresay if the first half hadn't been so engaging the second wouldn't have disappointed so much. One of the main criticisms levelled at the Marvel Studios films is that even the stronger entries usually trade any interesting ideas for CGI bombast in the climax. In that way at least Wandavision is consistent.