I've had a recurring complaint with the last few Steven Spielberg films that boils down to them being so dependent on nostalgia and sentiment. While usually technically stunning, they felt increasingly insular, and often hellbent on mythologizing the past. When I heard that Spielberg was remaking "West Side Story," I wasn't looking forward to it. The 1961 adaptation was never one of my favorites, and frankly felt very out of date by the time I saw it in the '90s. It didn't occur to me that Spielberg intended to drastically update the material. It never crossed my mind that he would succeed, and succeed beautifully.
The 2021 version of "West Side Story" is so much better than the 1961 version, I'm still a little in shock. First, all the Puerto Rican characters are cast with Latino actors, and often speak in unsubtitled Spanish. No more bad accents and distracting brownface makeup. Aside from the leads, nearly all the cast members are Broadway vets, so the dancing and vocals are not compromised an inch. And Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim's music has never sounded better, rearranged and remixed to accommodate some changes to the story. I love John Williams, but there's something about the marriage between Speilberg's visuals and the musical form here that enlivens both. It feels like this is the first proper Steven Spielberg film I've seen in ages, because there's so much inventiveness and verve and energy in this film that's been missing from his work for so long.
There's nothing fundamentally different in Spielberg's work in "West Side Story" from his work in "Ready Player One" or "The Post," or any of his other recent films. The sweeping Steadicam shots and the eye-popping colors are very familiar, just as the strains of "Maria," and "America," and "Tonight, Tonight" are. However, "Tonight, Tonight" is now being sung by Rita Moreno, playing an elderly shopkeeper named Valentina, a character created for the film. "Officer Krupke" has been restaged into a boisterous number inside the police station after the Jets have been arrested. Anybodys (iris menas) was originally a tomboy character in the 1961 musical, but is a transman here. Note that the character hasn't really changed, but the audience's understanding of gender dynamics over the last sixty years sure has.
It's the same with the turf war between the Caucasian Jets and Puerto Rican Sharks. Screenwriter Tony Kushner has added a ton of additional context and character details for the major players, pointing out the particular struggles each of them face, and that both groups are about to be displaced by the gentrification of Manhattan. The kids' cynicism about America and about their futures has never rung so true. As is tradition, the least interesting characters in this Romeo and Juliet story are the Romeo and the Juliet. Ansel Elgort is the weakest link as Tony, but I think he's perfectly serviceable. So is newcomer Rachel Zegler as the wide-eyed Maria. They just happen to be completely outclassed by Ariana DeBose's electrifying Anita, Mike Faist's danger-seeking Riff, and David Alvarez's glowering Bernardo. These actors are all theater pros, so of course they are.
The best thing I can say about Spielberg's "West Side Story" is that I often completely forgot that I was watching "West Side Story," to the extent that I was constantly being surprised when a familiar song would start playing during a scene I was already engrossed with. The school dance scene, for instance, puts the viewer right in the middle of so many simmering tensions between so many different characters that the beginning of the "Mambo" sequence caught me totally off guard. There's plenty of nostalgia in the film for the older versions of "West Side Story," but it's done with care and consideration. Moreno's appearance in the film, for instance, is far more than a cameo. In the end, however, I found the film elicits more happy memories of early Spielberg than anything else. When Maria and Tony have their fateful meeting, something about the shimmer of the lights and the swell of the music makes me feel like a five year-old watching "E.T." again.
2021 turns out to have been a great year for musicals after all.
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