The opening notes of West Side Story’s overture are among the most recognizable in musical theater. For the millions of people who watched classmates stumble through a high school production, and, of course, for those many millions more who have seen the 1961 film based on the stage show. Leonard Bernstein’s early blares—of glorious arrival and ominous warning—are so familiar, so enshrined in cultural memory, that it seems entirely unnecessary to re-create them on film. Why bother, when the old thing still feels so definitive?
That’s the big question that Steven Spielberg had to answer with his film version of West Side Story, as did screenwriter Tony Kushner. One strategy for a remake like this would be to completely upend things, the way madman stage director Ivo van Hove attempted with his recent, “I Feel Pretty”-less Broadway revival. But Spielberg is not an iconoclast; though his films are often darker and tougher-minded than he tends to gets credit for, he is enamored enough of Americana and its attendant sentiment that he wasn’t going to tear West Side Story down to the studs.
So he and Kushner had to take the trickier course: paying homage to the show’s legacy while giving it a new shine, gently and shrewdly tweaking rather than overhauling. To, I must admit, my great surprise, they pretty much pull it off, creating a West Side Story for new generations to thrill to, and giving purists only a few reasons to haughtily sniff in its direction.
This new take on the material is more sinewy and sensual. It balances the property’s inherent melodrama with added grit, but not so much extra scuzz that it feels like an overly modern provocation. Spielberg and Kushner still honor the original text’s quaintness, the way its makers had to be sneaky and a little evasive about what they were really talking about. Kushner is conscious of the imbalances (and worse) of the original text’s racial dynamics, and makes worthy attempts at correctives in his script. As does the film’s casting, which eschews the Natalie Wood-pretend of old in favor of actual Latinx actors who speak un-subtitled Spanish.
What Spielberg, for his part, does perhaps most effectively is imbue his film with a keen sense of place. A striking and clever visual joke at the start of the film locates us squarely in a lost corner of midtown Manhattan, where young men from Italian, Irish, and Polish backgrounds are waging a turf war with more recent Puerto Rican immigrants who occupy a neighborhood once known as San Juan Hill. Buildings are coming down as the city attempts to revitalize itself, giving the rival gangs less and less territory to fight over. Spielberg casts these dreamers and wastrels in a city that feels vibrantly alive and also dying, a quaking between urban eras.
And yet there is still something appropriately dreamlike about the setting, too. Spielberg and his trusty cinematographer Janusz Kaminski bathe the drama of Polish Tony and Puerto Rican Maria—two lovers caught in the middle of the clash—in chiaroscuro glow. Even in the daytime scenes, the film’s visuals have a sweetly soporific quality, lulling and painterly.
The film moves nimbly. Spielberg does lots of his typical canny and deceptively simple camera tricks, while ballet wunderkind turned in-demand choreographer Justin Peck has worked with Jerome Robbins’s iconic original choreography to create dance scenes that thrash and glide with intention and power. It’s a relief to see a movie musical that knows how to film dance sequences, when there are so many recent examples of just the opposite.
As Maria, newcomer Rachel Zegler has a voice as bright as a bell, and ably handles the dramatic heavy lifting when things turn to tragedy. (Spoiler alert; sorry.) Ariana DeBose is a suitably fierce and sultry Anita. She plays her a bit flintier than did Oscar-winner Rita Moreno, a recalibration that works well for this slightly rougher version of the tale. If you fear you’ll miss Moreno, worry not: she’s also in the film as a new character, the wife of shop proprietor Doc, doling out grande dame blessings and admonishments to the young people in her orbit.
To make it all the more worth Moreno’s precious time, Spielberg and Kushner have handed her “Somewhere,” a love song for the ages which is normally a duet between Tony and Maria. Moreno seizes the opportunity with gusto, but this transfer is one of the movie’s biggest structural missteps, sapping the story’s central couple of a defining bittersweet moment. Their love affair is all too brief even when they get to sing “Somewhere;” without it, it’s like we’ve barely seen them together.
That said, I wouldn’t be all that eager to hear Ansel Elgort, who plays Tony, do the song. He’s awfully stiff in the role, and his singing voice is no match for Zegler’s expertly controlled, resonant soprano. Elgort is as lost in their scenes as he is when trying to go toe to toe with Mike Faist’s wiry, charming Riff and David Alvarez’s imposing Bernardo. In an otherwise strong cast, Elgort stands out as an interloper from, perhaps, one of those high school productions.
Ultimately, though, Elgort’s wrongness and some of the errant song rearranging (“Cool” has been moved up in the timeline and given to Tony, which I don’t love) are minor quibbles about what is mostly a rousing success. The West Side Story movies old and new ought to exist in harmony with one another, each offering their own pleasures and problems, their own heart-swelling, sorrowful depictions of young love cut terribly short. Spielberg and Kushner have done justice to what Bernstein, Robbins, and the quite recently late Stephen Sondheim made all those years ago—not subverting its enduring value, but rather, with fire and grace, doing so much to earn it.
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