WEST SIDE STORY, A Not-Quite Timeless Classic, Gets a 21st Century Makeover
Unlike filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who grew up with an unapologetic, uncritical love of West Side Story, specifically the 1957 cast album of the Broadway musical later adapted into an Oscar-winning film, I’ve always had a conflicted, contradictory relationship with West Side Story. As an American-born Puerto Rican, I could both appreciate the skill and craft of the 1961 production, including, but not limited to, the combination of Stephen Sondheim’s earworm-worthy lyrics and Leonard Bernstein’s magisterial score, but I also couldn’t deny, often at face value or through personal interaction, that for many Americans of the Caucasian persuasion, their experience of Puerto Ricans individually and collectively was limited to a regressive, culturally myopic (if not downright insensitive) musical made more than half a century ago.
The recurring line, “Oh, you’re Puerto Rican like in West Side Story…” still echoes in my mind after several decades. The gangs in West Side Story might have engaged in dance-fights, but the perception of Puerto Ricans as interlopers, edging out and displacing their white predecessors in a now long-gone, semi-forgotten Manhattan, lingered in interactions. Representation mattered then just as much as it does now. Representation alone, however, isn’t enough, especially when the dominant white culture limits representation to stereotypes and caricatures without three-dimensional representation as a counterbalance.
All of which, naturally enough, left me with a mix of trepidation, dread, and anticipation when news broke that Steven Spielberg, inarguably the most commercially and artistically successful English-language filmmaker of his generation, would bring a second adaptation of Jerome Robbinss musical to the big screen. For Spielberg, bringing his take on West Side Story to the big screen wasn’t a dream denied, just a dream deferred. And while “essential” and “new West Side Story adaptation” probably don’t belong in the same sentence, Spielberg, working from Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner’s (Lincoln, Munich, Angels in America) revamp of Arthur Laurents’ dated book, delivers a worthy adaptation of the original that simultaneously honors the source material and brings it into a more diverse, culturally aware 21st century.
From its opening moments, a camera swooping through empty blocks of knocked down buildings, so-called “slum clearance” to make way for the future Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Spielberg and Kushner’s adaptation of West Side Story acknowledges the devastating, sometimes irreparable costs that gentrification can have on the inhabitants of newly razed neighborhoods. The film adds much needed context to the ultimately irrelevant battle between the Jets, an economically anxious, whites-only gang, and the Sharks, Puerto Rican immigrants relatively new to the West Side but who, like the Sharks, will soon be forced to move to other parts of the city. Neither the Jets nor the Sharks “own” anything, at least not literally, but they certainly act like they do, preferring dance-fighting (or just plain fighting) over metaphorical bragging rights like the right to enter each other’s claimed neighborhoods with impunity.
It’s an irony that’s lost on both sides of the racial, cultural, and economic divide. For Maria (Rachel Zegler, revelatory in the role Natalie Wood essayed 60 years ago) and Tony (Ansel Elgort, an unsurprisingly bland, recessive presence), their romance, built on the love-at-first-sight trope William Shakespeare popularized centuries ago in Romeo & Juliet (the loose inspiration for West Side Story), conquers all. Except, of course, it doesn’t, not in Shakespeare’s play and not in the real or reel worlds. Like their centuries old fictional counterparts, Maria and Tony’s romance is doomed to end in tragedy. Before then, though, there’s a virtual song catalog to get through, from “Something’s Coming” (Tony) to “Maria” (also Tony),and on through “Tonight” (Tony and Maria), “America” (led by Ariana DeBose’s Anita), “One Hand, One Heart” (Tony and Maria), “Somewhere” (sung by Valentina, a new character created for Oscar winner and original Anita Rita Morena), and several others of varying quality and interest sung jointly by members of the Jets (“La Borinqueña”) and the Sharks (“Gee, Officer Krupke,” “Cool”).
At each step, with each new shot, scene, or sequence, the 74-year-old Spielberg serves up reminder after reminder that time, though undefeated, still hasn’t dimmed his technical skills. As dynamically vibrant as any of his films considered among his best, West Side Story overflows with a visual élan that lesser filmmakers wouldn’t even attempt. Spielberg has long understood that whatever visual style he brings to a film must ultimately complement and not overwhelm the underlying material. It’s not by accident that Spielberg spends a considerable amount of time working with screenwriters before production begins, meaning that he rarely, if ever, relies on visuals to compensate for narrative shortcomings.
In West Side Story, obviously, that’s less of a problem, though Spielberg relies heavily on Kushner’s finely honed talent for dialogue and character development to modernize the story for 21st-century audiences. Kushner foregrounds the ethnic animosity, the bigotry, and ultimately the hatred that existed in mid-50s American cities without deluging audiences with long-winded, heavy-handed monologues or sermons, using bits of dialogue and, of course, Sondheim’s lyrics, to highlight both the universal yearnings and desires shared by the characters and the specific grievances that divide them. The tragic outcome is made all the more poignant thanks to a supremely talented cast (Elgort, a major exception, aside) delivering Sondheim’s lyrics with all the skill, talent, and passion at their disposal.
West Side Story opens theatrically on Friday, December 10th.
