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.
