REVIEW: West Side Story

Slight spoiler, the first shot of Steven Spielberg's West Side Story adaptation opens on a pile of rubble, a crumbled building wrecked to make way for new development. I amusedly wondered if this was maybe an accidental metaphor, a comment on this new adaptation of the stage show supplanting the legendary film version in 1961.

There's not a lot about the 2021 film adaptation that deviates largely from the blueprint of the 1961 film or the stage musical on which it is based. That blueprint, of course, being the romance between two teenagers on opposite ends of a gang rivalry in 1950s New York. A few songs get swapped around, the casting is more appropriate, but there's no gimmick.

We have to assume, then, that at the end of the day, Spielberg just wanted to try his hand at remaking a childhood favorite. Filmmakers, take note. Follow Spielberg's example. When revisiting an old text, you don't need a gimmick. Good taste is enough.

For a genre known for glitter and spotlights, this film spends a lot of time looking awfully dusty and dark. The aesthetic isn't quite as raw as Les Miserables (2012), but not a lot of musicals choose to cast so much of their story under shadows and darkness. Just so, there is some dialogue to this film's color palette, and when this film wants to, it knows how to make the colors pop.

In a film full of highlights, the centerpiece is "America." Watching that living fireworks show marked one of the few times I've had to stop myself from clapping mid-show in a movie theater. For whatever reason, Spielberg chose to wait until his seventies to start adding musicals to his repertoire, and he'll have to answer for that one day.

On the acting front, Ansel Elgort manages to make Tony less of a pretty boy while also making him more of a pretty boy. We'd all be calling him a decent singer if the narrative didn't constantly juxtapose his vocal performance with Zegler's own angelic tones.

With naught but a YouTube channel to her resume, Rachel Zegler is new to the world of film. And yet the film owes its timelessness less to its 60 year-old songbook and more to the glow Zegler brings, one which recalls all that is glorious about the classic days of Hollywood.

The "run away with me"-ness that is so integral to the romance between Tony and Maria felt slightly forced even in the 1961 film, and it lands more or less the same way here. You can get away with that love at first sight motif in an elevated mode of storytelling, but in the gritty atmosphere this movie chases, it requires a bit more of a leap from the audience--even with these songs, even with this cast.

Just so, once the audience does take the leap, they are accommodated for their effort. In a world this dark (the one onscreen or offscreen, take your pick), love unravaged by complication is a welcome abnormality. You get the idea that the darkness spoiling this beautiful world--the cloud of dust that paints the bright streets of New York gray, the shadow that Tony and Maria's love shines all the brighter against--is hate.

This film isn't the first (or hundredth) to make such a connection, but few of this film's predecessors can say they've explored the issue with such earnestness. One of the changes made to this rendition has the song "Somewhere" performed by Juanita, an original character for this adaptation played by Rita Moreno, the movie's one link to the 1961 film. In this new context, the song becomes a prayer for peace by the film's matriarch, a hymn that covers not just the aching of the young lovers, but an entire community bruised by baseless hatred. It's this kind of thing that reminds us why we bother with musicals new or classic to begin with.

Indeed, perhaps Spielberg's greatest accomplishment here is reconciling harsh reality with musical bliss, and doing so in a way that will make other films of the genre jealous. Thanks for joining the club, Steven.

--The Professor

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