West Side Story (2021), by and large, is a return to form for Steven Spielberg. The picture reminds us that when Spielberg is engaged by material, and animated by a good script, he can can achieve prodigious things. Unfortunately, the film falls flat in a few scenes and has some defects mostly attributable to the musical's book. But much of the picture is excellent and, although almost 2 1/2 hours long, the movie doesn't flag -- it's last half-hour that is lack-luster, but this is a problem with the original Sondheim/Bernstein/ Robbins musical.
Most of the cast is unknown; the lead, Maria, is new to movies and I didn't recognize any of the young actors playing the warring Jets and Sharks. Rita Moreno has been recruited to play the role of Doc, the drug store owner who was stage-Jewish and an elderly man in the original show on Broadway and, then, Robert Wise's highly acclaimed, if somewhat perfunctory, 1961 film version. (Moreno is listed as a co-producer of this picture and the Spielberg version has been viewed generally as recompense for the Puerto Rican actress being relegated to a minor part in the 1961 picture while Natalie Wood, who is Whiter than White (she was part Russian) was cast in the lead --and this despites the fact that she (Wood) was unable to sing. There are various differences between the 1957 Broadway musical, the '61 film, and Spielberg's version written by Tony Kushner (also identified as a producer). Apparently, the lyrics generally revert to the Broadway text. The famous aria, "I Feel Pretty" has been moved to after the climactic rumble -- a curious decision because this lengthens the last part of the movie which is unsuccessful compared to everything that precedes it. The original musical climaxes with the astonishing "Tonight Quartet", an operatic bit of music in which a soaring balladic love song is played as a counter-melody to aggressive music portraying the gang members preparing for combat -- the forces in the opera all converge on this sequence and the music is so spectacular that everything afterwards is anti-climactic. Therefore, it would seem to me best to pace the film to accelerate to a conclusion after the big fight scene and the killings of Riff and Bernardo. Putting "I feel pretty" after the rumble slows the movie -- I understand that the sequence is supposed to be brutally ironic but it doesn't work that way; the song is simply too perky to be interpreted as an instance of tragic irony (Maria is singing about her love for Tony just as he is fleeing from where he has stabbed her brother, Bernardo, to death). Robert Wise and Ernest Lehman (the green screenwriter responsible for North by Northwest among other pictures) intuitively understood that the opera is too long, sags in its third act, and should be hurried along to the finale. The gas goes out of Spielberg's picture after the extremely witty and gorgeously choreographed "I feel Pretty" sequence and the end of the movie, as with the musical, is pretty much of a drag compared to the wonderful stuff preceding it.
The opening sequences replace Wise's helicopter shots of Manhattan skyscrapers with a bombed-out zone, something that looks like Syria or Baghdad --we are seeing the destruction of the old West side neighborhood through the urban renewal project that will result in Lincoln Center (the home of the Metropolitan Opera among other things.) The camera surveys smashed scaffolding and acres of ruins before the Jets emerge, literally popping out of the ground with cans of paint. (They intend to deface a Puerto Rican flag painted on the wall in the Latin neighborhood just beyond the urban renewal war zone.) Spielberg's direction of the first hour of the film is frenetic, adrenalin-laced, and showy -- the cutting is razor-sharp and the dance numbers are spectacular. As the Jets strut down the street, some of them spontaneously extend their strides and throw out their chests and, in the scope of about thirty seconds, boy-warrior posturing has turned into dance -- it's a magically devised sequence. When the Jets climb a heap of rubble someone picks up a brick and throws it at the camera. The film cuts to Tony working the basement of Rita Moreno's drugstore and bodega -- someone has pitched a can at him and he deftly catches it, completing the trajectory of the brick thrown in the preceding shot. When the Sharks (the Puerto Rican gang) cross a busy street, they ignore traffic surging around them and almost cause about four accidents. It's typical of Spielberg's exuberance that he can stage a sequence of some young men jaywalking with such memorable aplomb that the audience gasps. The director's trademark lighting is on display in the high school auditorium dance scene where the doomed lovers meet -- Spielberg yanks his principals out of the chorus of dancers and make them literally glow with a supernatural radiance. A love scene staged under bleachers while the rest of the dancers blur into multi-colored, out-of-focus orbs dimly glimpsed through the bleacher seats has enormous force -- the lovers are literally set apart from the rest of the scene and bathed in brilliant auroras of camera flares. The famous balcony scene involves Tony climbing up the side of the building to the height of about fifty feet -- then, the lovers are shot through grills and bars at the beginning of the sequence; as Tony wins over Maria, the obstructions between them fall away -- the love scene is witnessed by laundry tacked to aerial clothes lines and windows in the tenements that glow with honeyed amber light. Tony takes Maria on a date to the Cloisters. The medieval arcades are shot under a greenish sky and the air trembles with thunder. Then, the sunlight comes out and the couple speaks their vows as beams of light ignite a stained glass window and spill colored radiance all over the floor. There's a spectacular ballet that set on a badly damaged pier with the dancers lunging over ripped-open parts of the wooden dock and posing against wild tangles of broken wood. (The holes in the dock allow for fabulous-looking low angle shots featuring the dancers leaping over the fissures in the waterfront pier.) The big battle between the Sharks and the Jets takes place is stark white warehouse full of pyramids of road salt -- the combatants cast enormous shadows as they charge one another. "I feel pretty" is staged in Gambles, a department store, and the rather prissy, British-style lyrics (probably a parody of My Fair Lady) actually make sense with the charwomen posturing among pretentiously dressed mannequins, decked out in tuxedos and evening gowns for "Dinner at 8." The scene is exuberantly performed and has the crazy Looney Tunes energy that Spielberg can occasionally muster -- I still recall with amazement the fantastic jitter-bug sequences in 1941, a movie that showed the same sort of visual ebullience and go-for-broke ingenuity as the first two-thirds of this film. After that number, the movie goes cold, but so does the Broadway musical -- nonetheless, Rita Moreno gets to sing "Someday", one of the show's signature tunes and the aria is much more affecting in her version than the lip-synched sequence with Natalie Wood in the 1961 film. Spielberg's an old man now and Rita Moreno, I think, is in her mid-80's and the film makes way for something like the wisdom of age -- it's effective and almost saves the ending of the movie from becoming excessively maudlin. (In this version of the story, Rita Moreno's character was married to a non-Puerto Rican who is now dead -- therefore, the film suggests in an eerie way what might have happened to Tony and Maria and their cross-ethnic romance if the Shakespearian tragedy hadn't intervened.)
There are some weird mistakes in the 2021 picture. When Tony takes Maria to the Cloisters, he makes a sudden exit, brusquely telling her that he'll see her around soon. This completely deflates the love scene -- he brought her all the way up to Fort Tryon and, then, abandons her there. The famous satirical song "Dear Officer Krupke" is very inventively staged and the choreography is thrilling but the sequence doesn't make any sense. A woman who looks like a prostitute views the number from another room in the police station and seems strangely confused and worried -- who is she supposed to be? The scene "reads' as if she were a police informant but this isn't a plot point that goes anywhere. When Officer Krupke comes back to see his police station premises wrecked with files strewn all over the floor, he looks as if he's just seen a ghost. It's as if something horrible happened to him out on the street when he suddenly exited six minutes earlier chasing a trans-sexual character who has escaped from custody. He's so shocked and morose when he returns that we think Krupke has witnessed some sort of ghastly calamity. I don't know what to make of how this sequence ends and the whole premise of the famous number gets tangled up in too many politically correct subtexts to be coherent. Late in the picture, a couple of minor characters suddenly become important. It turns out that Tony has a would-be girlfriend, Valentina, who gets to mouth some bitter lines -- but the part is underwritten to the point of non-existence and her sudden appearance near the end of the movie is jarring. Similarly, the character of Chino, Bernardo's choice of a good Puerto Rican boyfriend for his sister, Maria, is also underwritten and so he is scarcely visible until he emerges from the shadows to enact the film's grim climax. Oddly enough the opera's showstopper, the convergence of gang members and Maria's love song in the "Tonight Quintet" doesn't really work well in the film. The ballad and its counter-melody have to be experienced as if the singers are all on stage (although in opposite corners) when the piece is performed. Spielberg opens the scene out and makes it cinematic with a roving camera and dynamic cross-cutting, but this detracts for the energy of the music -- this is a theatrical tour-de-force and should be shot with all the characters within a single stylized space and not scattered over mid-town Manhattan as is the case with the staging here.
These are relatively minor cavils and the most of the film is as well-directed and energetic as anything that Spielberg has made. The film has been famously unprofitable. It's viewed, I suppose, as a period piece and not relevant to today's world. The picture arises from post-War optimism asserting that people should abandon tribal allegiances and strive for the Common Good. Who believes this in America in 2021?
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