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

Comments

REVIEW: ELIO

Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth. There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true. The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space? But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...

JAWS: The Father of All Blockbusters Turns 50

The saga of Hollywood lives and dies on the ripples of a thousand different choices. Hundreds of movies each year from hundreds of artists serving hundreds of markets creates a complex, interconnected ecosystem that can never really be explored in its totality. Still, if there was one film, one moment, that trampolined Hollywood from one era into the next, it was in 1975 with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws . Moviegoing had naturally been a part of the global industry since moving pictures stole everyone’s attention at the start of the century. Tentpole films were also very much a part of the program. But the treatment of movies like The Sound of Music and Ben-Hur was done with an eye for prestige, more comparable to how Oscar hopefuls handle things today. Theaters at this time were still generally accustomed to having sporadic releases across the country over a period of several weeks. Limited roadshow releases were how you signaled that a movie’s importanc...

REVIEW: Jurassic World - Rebirth

I had a mixed reaction to Jurassic World: Rebirth, but it did make for one of the most enjoyable theater experiences I've had in recent memory. I have to imagine that a part of this is because my most common theater appointments are matinee screenings, but I had the opportunity to see this one at a fairly well-attended midnight screening. And there's nary a film more tailored for surround-sound roaring and screens wide enough to contain these de-extinct creatures. ("Objects on the screen feel closer than they appear.") It was natural for me to cap the experience by applauding as the credits stared to roll, even if, as usual, I was the only one in the auditorium to do so. Yes, I am that kind of moviegoer; yes, I enjoyed the experience that much, and I imagine I will revisit it across time. That's not to imagine the movie is beyond reproach, but for I suppose it bears mentioning that, generally , th...

REVIEW: Lilo & Stitch

By now the system errors of Disney's live-action remake matrix are well codified. These outputs tend to have pacing that feels like it was okayed by a chain store manager trying to lower the quarterly statement. They also show weird deference to very specific gags from their animated source yet don't bother to ask whether they fit well in the photorealistic world of live-action. And combing through the screenplay, you always seem to get snagged on certain lines of dialogue that someone must have thought belonged in a children's movie ("Being gross is against galactic regulation!). These are all present in this summer's live-action reinvention of "Lilo & Stitch." But mercifully, this remake allows itself to go off-script here and there. The result may be one of the stronger Disney remakes ... whatever that's worth. The 2002 animated masterpiece by Dean Deblois and Chris Sanders (who voices the little blue alien in bo...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it. Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate. So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, direc...

REVIEW: Materialists

In seminal romantic comedies or dramas, the mark of great writing was in artfully burying the lovebirds' insecurities and hangups in artifice. Pretense. The lovebirds didn't know how to honestly approach their own feelings at first. The distortion revealed the personality of both the situation and the relationship. What's more, it was just fun. The film would slowly thaw this facade until Cary Grant and Irene Dunne finally had, what Materialists calls, the ugliest parts of themselves laid bare for one another. Only then were they ready to embrace. Yet with Materialists , out this weekend, even in moments when the situation calls for vulnerability, the characters are oddly empirical and clinical with describing the things about them that they are ashamed of. These players might as well be performing a passionate reading of a Walmart receipt. Yes, Materialists is very obviously about the transactionality of the dating scene, but the movie ...

REVIEW: The Legend of Ochi

This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET ," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence. But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi , does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else. Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism. On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of ...

Wicked vs Maleficent

“Witch” has historically been used as a pejorative for a non-conformist woman, someone who does not obey the expectations of her culture. It’s little wonder, then, that a society with more progressive mores would commandeer the witch archetype into a warrior for social justice, or that the most famous witch of them all would spearhead this retyping. Yes, I am thinking of a certain Broadway musical and a fiery, green-skinned, justice-bent rebel-rouser. Wicked is a stage musical that follows the infamous Wicked Witch of the West as featured in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz . By shedding light on what happened before Dorothy dropped into Oz, Wicked recasts the witch as not a villain, but a misunderstood heroine. The show has been defying gravity on Broadway for coming on twenty years now, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. When Disney’s Maleficen t came along a little over ten years later, the shorthand description of the film was basic...

You're Not Stupid for Loving Jurassic World

I had an experience in the comment section of a YouTube video essay back in 2018 . This was around the release of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and the essay traced out how the original Jurassic Park developed its character arcs. I thought it was a nice analysis, and many of the comments seemed to agree. But I inevitably came across one comment lamenting how far the "Jurassic" franchise had fallen and how the new "Jurassic World" films just didn't care about things like character arcs anymore. I did a foolish thing and replied to this comment with my honest opinion, that being ... the JW films actually took a very similar approach to their character arcs, and arguments to the contrary weren’t giving the new films proper credit. One person replied directly to my comment, countering my point with “HAAHAHAHAAHA.” And, well, I just couldn’t argue with that … The Jurassic World movies are especially vulnerable to a certa...

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Do Clementine and Joel Stay Together or Not?

Maybe. The answer is maybe. Not wanting to be that guy who teases a definitive answer to a difficult question and forces you to read a ten-page essay only to cop-out with a non-committal excuse of an answer, I’m telling you up and front the answer is maybe. Though nations have long warred over this matter of great importance, the film itself does not answer once and for all whether or not Joel Barrish and Clementine Krychinzki find lasting happiness together at conclusion of the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Min d. I cannot give a definitive answer as to whether Joel and Clementine’s love will last until the stars turn cold or just through the weekend. This essay cannot do that. What this essay can do is explore the in-text evidence the film gives for either side t...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog