Monthly Archives: January 2022

  • West Side Story (2021)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Spielberg (2021)

    The second big-screen West Side Story arrives in cinemas sixty years after the first; Sally and I happened to see Steven Spielberg’s remake two years to the day after last watching the Robert Wise-Jerome Robbins version.  Spielberg’s film, though it’s not faring well at the box office, has been praised by most critics[1] but plenty of reviews, including some of the good ones, have asked:  why remake West Side Story?  The answer to that is, why not?  Mark two isn’t arriving hot on the heels of its famous forerunner, and it’s hardly as if the 1961 film is unimprovable.  A more pertinent question is why Spielberg, after a half-century of movie-making and thirty-odd features as director, decided he was well placed to try his hand at a musical for the first time.  As I watched the film, that question refused to go away.

    For the most part, Spielberg has cast the main roles persuasively.  As Maria, newcomer Rachel Zegler is very pretty and appealingly innocent; she has a beautiful singing voice.  Ariana DeBose, a powerfully glamorous Anita and a fine dancer, comes into her own in the film’s second half.  Maria and Anita’s ‘A Boy Like That’ duet is the dramatic highlight of this West Side Story.  As the gang leaders, David Alvarez (Bernardo) and Michael Faist (Riff) contrast well – Faist’s bony, ratty look complements Alvarez’s more imposing presence.  Ansel Elgort’s Tony isn’t convincing but that maybe goes with the part.  The tension between West Side Story‘s Romeo and Juliet basis and gritty contemporaneity crystallises in the character of Tony, who needs to pass muster as both a former delinquent and a romantic ideal.  This version gives further salience to the problem by making Tony a parolee who’s done time for violent assault, and by putting a bland, sleek actor in the role.  But Elgort, whom I was predisposed not to like (on the strength of The Fault in Our Stars (2014) and Baby Driver (2017)), is better than I expected – and a lot better than Richard Beymer in the first film.  It’s liable to be under-appreciated that Spielberg’s cast, unlike their precursors, do all their own singing (some of it live on set, most of it pre-recorded), and justice to Leonard Bernstein’s great music.

    The older characters are less successful.  Brian d’Arcy James (Krupke) and Corey Stoll (Shrank) are rather stagy.  It’s cheering that ninety-year-old Rita Moreno, who played Anita in the 1961 film, is again involved, both as an executive producer and in a role specially designed for her.  The latter is problematic, though, in conception and execution.  Moreno is Valentina, who owns the general-store-cum-soda-shop where Tony works, and which Valentina once ran with her late husband.  In other words, her character replaces Doc, the store owner in the original stage musical and the first film. While Doc is no great loss, his widow makes no sense.  She’s a Puerto Rican who married a gringo.  The Jets regularly hang out at her store.  If mixed marriage was OK decades ago and the white gang members remain happy to support what’s now a Latinx business, where does that leave the racial problem central to West Side Story?  Unlike another recent nonagenarian musical return, Dick Van Dyke’s cameo in Mary Poppins Returns (2018), Rita Moreno’s part is neither small nor insignificant.  She isn’t asked to dance but Spielberg entrusts ‘Somewhere’ to her, and her alone.  She sings it quietly, in the same tempo that she delivers her lines throughout.  Her metronomic hush draws you in at first then becomes tiresome.

    Moreno’s fellow executive producer, Tony Kushner, also wrote the screenplay (as he did for Spielberg’s Munich (2005), with Eric Roth, and Lincoln (2012)).  Tony’s jailbird past is a mistake and Valentina a bigger one but Kushner does make some worthwhile adjustments to the Arthur Laurents book and screenplay.  The Jets’ dialogue is sharper and meaner.  Bernardo is now an aspiring professional boxer – a demonstrably credible Latino route to making it in America.  Krupke and Shrank remind the Jets and Sharks that their territorial dispute in San Juan Hill, Lincoln Square is about to be bulldozed out of existence; at the very start, Spielberg shows slum clearance taking place (to make way for what will be Lincoln Center).  It’s an effective touch that the first Jet we see emerges from beneath the rubble but the idea of gang warfare as a juvenile underworld isn’t followed through.  Instead, it’s merged with everyday social life in the area, in ways that owe less to West Side Story than to a screen tradition deriving from other musicals.  Even though the Wise-Robbins production design now looks implausibly hygienic, at least their Jets and Sharks often seemed to inhabit the margins of Manhattan’s West Side.  When Spielberg shows the warring factions dancing in the street, in full view of passers-by going about their business cheerfully and undisturbed, he dilutes the gangs’ subversive impact.

    Jerome Robbins staged ‘America’ on the roof of the Puerto Ricans’ apartment block at night, and the space was made to look pretty crowded (‘Twelve in a room in America’).  Robbins was thus able to replicate the elating effect of a great dance routine in a stage musical that results from the release of intense energy in a limited space.  The combative yet exultant number that resulted is the dance zenith of the 1961 film.  Spielberg and his choreographer, Justin Peck, by bringing the routine down into the streets in broad daylight, seriously diffuses – and defuses – the exciting momentum.  Perhaps it was only to be expected that a film-maker famed for brilliant editing would opt for the death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach repeatedly favoured by twenty-first-century directors of screen musicals:  in this West Side Story (as in, for example, Rob Marshall’s Chicago (2002)), the rhythm of dance movement is subjugated to the rhythm of dynamic editing (by Michael Kahn and Sarah Broshar).  In 1961, Robert Wise’s cross-cutting of the ‘Tonight Quintet’ gave it a kinetic distinctiveness that’s lost when conspicuous editing of numbers is the norm, as it is here.  It’s no coincidence that the most successful moments in Spielberg’s film include less obviously mobile ones.  ‘A Boy Like That’, which has intense emotional movement, is a rare instance of the camera keeping fairly still (as well as of a song sung live on set).  So is the Maria-Tony duet of ‘Tonight’, though it too is far from static:  Tony’s taking his leave via the building’s fire escape nicely foreshadows his literal escape down same after killing Bernardo.

    While he and Tony Kushner understandably didn’t think it necessary to update the original 1950s setting in order for West Side Story  to speak to the divided America de nos jours, Spielberg does apply a dose of modern political correctness by eschewing English subtitling of the Spanish dialogue spoken by the Sharks and their girls.  His attempt to make the West Side Story kids and their environment more earthily credible than their screen predecessors is sometimes disturbed, though, by visual decoration that verges on religiose kitsch.  At the end of ‘Maria’, Tony stands in a puddle that reflects light in such a way as to surround him with a halo.   In ‘One Hand, One Heart’, relocated to the Cloisters Museum in Washington Heights, the lovers’ DIY wedding climaxes in a light show through stained glass windows.  Spielberg’s DP, Janusz Kamiński, a proven lighting genius, may not have been the best cinematographer for this particular job.  A succession of shots of NYC buildings and other street features that accompany the closing credits achieve the effect of urban poetry more truly than any other images in the film.

    14 December 2021

    [1] As I write this note, the Rotten Tomatoes rating is 92% fresh from 339 reviews.

  • House of Gucci

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ridley Scott (2021)

    Over the last forty years or so, I’ve walked out of more Ridley Scott films (Alien, A Good Year, The Counsellor) than I’ve enjoyed (Thelma & Louise, The Martian).  House of Gucci is Scott’s twenty-seventh feature and, at 158 minutes, his longest so far (outlasting American Gangster by one minute)[1].  I can’t help feeling I did well to see it through but why is the picture so lengthy?  Mainly, it seems, because Scott can’t decide if he’s making a Godfather-style epic of dynastic intrigue and corruption, or a camp-fest.  House of Gucci staggers on, as if to help him make up his mind.  There’s only one good reason for staying with the film – the lead actress.

    The story begins in the early 1970s, when Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) first meets her future husband, Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver).  It climaxes in 1995, when hitmen hired by Patrizia shoot Maurizio dead.  At the start, Patrizia runs the office at her father’s trucking firm and Maurizio is a law student, as well as heir, through his father, Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons), to half the Gucci fashion house and fortune.  Rodolfo dismisses Patrizia as a gold-digger and, when his son ignores his warnings and marries her, disinherits Maurizio.  Once she’s pregnant, smart, opportunistic Patrizia sees the child she’s having as a means to getting Maurizio back in Rodolfo’s good books, and will.  She charms Maurizio’s uncle Aldo (Al Pacino) and his dim-witted, would-be designer son Paolo (Jared Leto); Aldo successfully persuades Rodolfo to reconcile with Maurizio but the old man dies before signing a document transferring the 50% of Gucci shares to his son.  Nothing daunted, Patrizia fakes Rodolfo’s signature.  Pulling the strings of her husband, who’s lukewarm about the business, she embarks on a plan to acquire shares from Aldo and Paolo, who hold the remaining 50%.

    Much of what follows describes Patrizia’s successful attempts to discredit or incriminate Aldo and Paolo – the former for tax evasion in the US, the latter for unauthorised use of the Gucci trademark, and so on.  When the police try to arrest Maurizio for forging his father’s signature, he and Patrizia flee Italy for Switzerland, where Maurizio starts an affair with old flame Paola Franchi (Camille Cottin).  Perhaps under Paola’s influence (though this isn’t clear – nor, to me, was why he felt safe returning to Italy), Maurizio becomes more interested in running Gucci.  He recruits hot-shot American designer Tom Ford (Reeve Carney) to revitalise the Gucci brand, and hatches his own scheme for getting his hands on the shares Aldo and Paolo have clung onto.  Maurizio proves a hopeless businessman.  As a result of his mismanagement, the equity company from which he has sought help, buys him out; Ford and Maurizio’s long-serving wingman, Domenico De Sole (Jack Huston), take over at the top.  Patrizia, after refusing Maurizio’s request for a divorce, decides to have her husband killed.  The closing text on the screen explains that she was convicted of murder, along with the gunmen and Pina (Salma Hayek), her friend, personal psychic and partner-in-crime. Patrizia ‘the Black Widow’ Reggiani is still serving her long prison sentence.

    Even though two of them are Italian Americans, Ridley Scott insists on his principal cast members abandoning their normal voices in favour of spicka-da-Eengleesh accents, managed with strikingly varying degrees of success.  Worse, the director’s scattershot approach to the material appears to confuse at least one of his stars while allowing others to do what they like, to gruesome effect.  Adam Driver tries to play Maurizio reasonably straight, in a fruitless search for depth in the role as written (by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna).  In contrast, Al Pacino’s and Jared Leto’s interpretations of Aldo and Paolo are garishly overdrawn.  Tonally chaotic, the film nearly grinds to a halt each time Leto, under a ton of prosthetic make-up, is doing his turn.  The main men in House of Gucci are so annoying I could have forgiven Patrizia for killing them all.

    I soon came to dread the every reappearance of Pacino and Leto so can only be thankful that the reverse was true with Lady Gaga.  On their first encounter, Maurizio flatters Patrizia by roguishly pretending to mistake her for Elizabeth Taylor.  It’s an inadvertently apt comparison.  In her Hollywood heyday, Taylor not only gave some fine performances in good pictures but also understood, and accepted, when she wasn’t in a good picture.  In the latter cases (Raintree County and The VIPs are two examples), she still played her role without condescension or contempt.  She knew she was dealing with trash but her acting was engaged and impassioned[2].  Lady Gaga has a similar quality in House of Gucci.  In this, her first starring non-singing screen role, she’s unfailingly vivid and emotionally uncompromising, whatever she’s asked to do.  The other women’s parts aren’t up to much – Camille Cottin and Salma Hayek are more or less wasted – although Mia McGovern Zaini, as Patrizia and Maurizio’s unhappy daughter Alessandra, is a silently distressing presence.

    The couple’s courtship provides the only nuanced exchanges in the whole film.  The collapse of their relationship is treated as a given:  Scott and his screenwriters virtually ignore what’s happening in the marriage until Maurizio hotfoots it to St Moritz and Patrizia, when she joins him, is portrayed, suddenly and crudely, as an arriviste embarrassment to her husband and his jet-set circle of friends.  Harry Gregson-Williams’s score is eclipsed throughout by the snatches of opera and pop songs that Scott piles onto the soundtrack.  The classical stuff is there to underline the emotional extremity of the story:  after all, Scott seems to be saying, these people are Italians and you know what they’re like … !  The pop choices tend to be crushingly obvious:  ‘I’ve Got Your Number’, sung by Bobby Short, when Patrizia brings to light Aldo’s unpaid taxes; ‘It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year’ (Andy Williams), as a joyless family Christmas gets underway.  Personal and business relationships disintegrate to the accompaniment of Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’.

    Scott’s view of his characters is hard to make sense of.  He skewers them for two-and-a-half hours yet there’s a note of regret in the closing legends recording that Aldo and Paolo died, from prostate cancer and in poverty, respectively, soon after the sale of their shares to Maurizio – and that the Gucci company of today includes no family members.  Next to Lady Gaga’s performance, the film’s main asset is Patrizia’s wardrobe, designed by Janty Yates (and which Gaga wears with aplomb).  Perhaps there’s more fun to be had from this mess if you’re au fait with the big names of the fashion world and can spot them passing through.  I managed only Anna Wintour (Catherine Walker), thanks to the hairdo; it was very late on that I even twigged Maurizio’s American signing was Tom Ford, who is deemed to need no introduction.  I’d never heard of Ford until he turned movie director with A Single Man and Nocturnal Animals – both seriously overrated, neither as bad as House of Gucci.

    7 December 2021

    [1] To be more precise, House of Gucci is the longest Scott film shown in cinemas.  The director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven (which I’ve not seen in any version) is 194 minutes.

    [2] This didn’t stop her calling out the trash in due course but her disparagement of Butterfield 8 (‘it stinks’) didn’t show in her performance, for which Taylor won her first Oscar.

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