‘Side’ Kick
Steven Spielberg dusts off a classic but slightly outmoded Broadway staple for modern audiences in spectacular, snapping-and-spinning technicolor fashion.
west side story
Director: Steven Spielberg • Writer: Tony Kushner, based on the musical by Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins
Starring: Rachel Zegler, Ansel Elgort, Ariana DeBose, David Alvarez, Mike Faist, Corey Stoll, Josh Andrés Rivera, Iris Menas, Brian d’Arcy James
USA • 2hrs 36mins
Opens Hong Kong Jan 6 • IIA
Grade: A-
I’m not a huge Steven Spielberg fan. I find his work somewhat facile and overly-sentimental when it comes to anything significant — like slavery (Amistad), the Holocaust (Schindler’s List) or press freedom (The Post). But to suggest he doesn’t understand filmmaking, or that he has no clue how to construct a story is utter bullshit and just being contrarian for the hell of it. Spielberg has set the bar time and again, artistically and commercially, for blockbuster filmmaking and how to exploit digital visual effects, well, effectively. There’s a reason 1993’s Jurassic Park still looks better than The Return of the King or Black Panther, or The Matrix: Reloaded, or Hulk… You get the idea. He’s among the best in the world at what he does.
So when news came he was remaking the 1961 Oscar-winning musical West Side Story it was a bit of head-scratcher. Was Spielberg bucket-listing? Dodging the IRS by just burning cash? Who knows and, frankly, who cares now? Because this version of Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents’s spin on Romeo and Juliet is precisely what a remake should be: a contemporary interpretation of a classic, chosen because its fundamental themes and ideas hold up 50 years later. Which is to say: Why are black and brown people still being harassed by cops, evicted from their homes and subjected to racist violence, and why do entitled white people feel like it’s okay to do this? This is why West Side Story still works. Oh, and it absolutely blasts from the song and dance angle. “America” is as sing-along-able as ever, and the snappy, swirly, “Prologue” still grabs you by the throat from minute one. Musical nerds should be losing their damn minds.
Let’s get ready to rumble… or at least have a dance off
Spielberg, of course, has the kind of clout to pull together a flawless cast and all-star crew to make an old-fashioned, jazz hands-loaded spectacle. He’s got his regular shooter Janusz Kamiński (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) behind the camera for the vaguely retro, glorious Technicolor visuals, production designer Adam Stockhausen (12 Years a Slave, The French Dispatch) to recreate mid-century Manhattan, Tony Award winning New York City Ballet choreographer Justin Peck is around to modernise Jerome Robbins’s original moves, and Broadway costume designer Paul Tazewell (a Tony winner for Hamilton) rounds out a stacked crew. The result is a bombastic, tactile, swaggering movie musical, the kind not seen since… well since In the Heights last June. They’re two entirely different films that share a giddy, joyous vibe, but Heights is a slice of Puerto Rican life with a dash of family drama tossed in. West Side Story has grander ambitions.
The core story remains the same. Jets street gang co-founder and ex-con Tony (unfortunately, Ansel Elgort) meets María (newcomer Rachel Zegler, the new Snow White) at a neighbourhood dance during a time when racial tensions are rising. It’s a movie, so they fall head over heels in about 20 minutes, much to the chagrin of her brother, Sharks gang leader Bernardo (David Alvarez, awesome) and the trepidation of his girlfriend Anita (the utterly mesmerising and thieving Ariana DeBose, Schmigadoon!). After a long simmering gang fight ends with Bernardo and Jets leader Riff (Mike Faist, Tony nominated for his role as Connor in Dear Evan Hansen) dead, Tony and María decide to leave it all behind. It ends badly.
“Cool” boys Riff and Tony fighitng over a gun. No comment on the homoerotic imagery that might be there
So what’s new? Where to start? Spielberg and Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner have dialled up the details that were marginalised in 1961: the razing of predominantly Puerto Rican, Black and immigrant neighbourhoods for “urban renewal” (and eventually the Lincoln Center) in the 1950s gives the drama more context, the Jets’ rage tipping into sexual violence and what is clearly a potential gang rape is not something that would have been acknowledged for what it was in the ’60s, and the peripheral “tomboy” character, Anybodys, is allowed to be the more honest trans man he was coded as. Most obviously the casting is all new, because duh, it’s 2021. The Sharks cast is 100% Latinx and trans actor Iris Menas plays Anybodys. Finally, in a tip of the hat to the original, Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for her performance as Anita, turns up as Valentina, the chemist Doc’s widow, whose pharmacy is neutral ground for the warring gangs.
And shush, this isn’t “wokenss” or “correctness.” It’s authenticity. They’re different. The updates are seamless and organic, and only serve to make the story resonate more thoroughly. If you really think all of this is no big deal you really need to read the room.
West Side Story loses some of its swagger by virtue of suffering the La La Land curse: its leading man isn’t that strong a singer, though admittedly Elgort is a smidge better than Ryan Gosling. Back in the day Elgort would have been dubbed over with a “real” vocalist (as Richard Beymer was). More weak tea comes from María and Tony, whose romance is simply the inciting incident so to speak, and who remain the least compelling part of the action. That was the case in 1961. It’s the case now. But with Spielberg and Kushner committing to more detail in the vivid backdrop and more attention to narrative structure — the song “Cool” is resituated closer to the stage version’s first act and tweaks its symbolic meaning ever so slightly — they’ve juiced what could have been a carbon copy for something more relevant yet just as fantastical. Like I said: One of the best at what he does. Watch your back, Miranda. DEK
If you don’t leave the theatre stomping about this woman’s star power you have no soul