Review: just another West Side Story

The new film adaptation of West Side Story — directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay by Tony Kushner, based upon the landmark 1957 musical by Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim — has tread an uneven path to its present realization.

Initially scheduled to arrive in time for Christmas 2020, the movie’s release date was pushed forward one year to account for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This resulted in a opening more poetic than the filmmakers could’ve ever planned: it aligned with the sixtieth anniversary of the original, Oscar-winning film adaptation, co-directed by Robbins and Robert Wise; the ninetieth birthday of Rita Moreno, who has starred in both films and executive-produced this latest version; and, stunningly, with the death of lyricist Sondheim, who passed at the age of ninety-one just three days shy of the film’s premiere.

Yet in spite of all this cosmic significance, West Side Story has not done well financially; its box office receipts have been much weaker than expected — only generating about sixty-one million dollars after a month and a half in theaters, against its hundred-million-dollar budget.

This is unusual for Spielberg, who is not known for directing flops. After decades of industry-redefining triumphs — from Jaws, E.T., and Jurassic Park to his recent streak of high-grossing historical dramas like Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, and The Post — the man is widely recognized as both a creative and commercial genius, someone who knows what will sell just as intuitively as what will play.

And indeed, who could imagine a safer bet for Spielberg than a new, racially-inclusive production of one of the most beloved American musicals?

For those of you who are unfamiliar, West Side Story is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, set in the streets of late-1950s New York City. Two rival gangs, the Polish-American Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks, battle over a shrinking West Side neighborhood. In the midst of this turf war, a young woman, Maria (played here by Rachel Zegler), sister to the leader of the Sharks, and a former Jet, Tony (Ansel Elgort), meet and fall in love. What unfolds as result of their romance is a tragedy that highlights the cruel personal costs inflicted on those who dare to defy a world defined by race.

The musical remains a rousing, if somewhat overly-simplistic cry for interracial harmony, and a key turning point in the history of American musical theater with its innovative blend of lyrical music, athletic dancing and dramatic themes.

There are at least two major, conspicuous differences between Spielberg’s film and the original adaptation: first, while both movies were filmed on location, the earlier of the two was filmed on the actual streets depicted in the story. Produced in 1960, Wise’s and Robbins’ film shoot coincided with infamous urban planner Robert Moses’ decision to raze a predominately Black- and Latino-occupied neighborhood to build Lincoln Center, site of the new New York City Opera.

Because of this morbidly coincidental timing, the opening sequence of the first West Side Story — renowned for Robbins’ electric, finger-snapping choreography — was filmed against a backdrop of abandoned buildings just weeks before they were demolished.

Spielberg and Kushner point out this ironic slice of history in their movie’s opening shot: panning over piles of rubble and cranes with massive wrecking balls, the camera settles on a billboard announcing Lincoln Center’s construction. Righteous though it may be, from a historical point of view, the shot is befuddling because it suggests that we’re picking up where the first movie left off… in other words, everything we’re watching took place sixty years ago during the construction of Lincoln Center, shortly after the filming of the Robbins-Wise West Side Story.

So Spielberg’s Tony and Maria are real people living in a world where there’s already a Broadway musical about their romance that’s been turned into a movie, before they’ve even met! It’s a break in the time-space continuum — Stephen Sondheim by way of The Twilight Zone.

Such a choice is representative of Spielberg’s movie as a whole: it understandably strives to bring the political ethos of West Side Story “up to date,” as it were, but in the process also betrays the musical’s unique emotional logic.

Another major example of this concerns the film’s casting, or rather its representation of characters. In keeping with standard yet racist casting practices of its era, the Robbins-Wise film adaptation featured white actors in most of the lead roles — including Russian-American Natalie Wood and Greek-American George Chakiris as Puerto Rican brother and sister, Maria and Bernardo. To make matters worse, the actors were required to wear dark facial makeup to make them look more “ethnic.”

Throughout his promotion of West Side Story, Spielberg has referenced this disturbing aspect of the original movie and emphasized his own casting of Latine or Hispanic actors in each of the Puerto Rican roles. Yet is this really something to brag about? Did Spielberg have any other option? Casting white actors and having them sport brownface would not fly today, at least not in so politically-conscious a film. (Whitewashing still occurs in plenty of mainstream movies, like Ghost in the Shell [2017] and The Laundromat [‘19].)

I give Spielberg credit for wanting to do the right thing — yet why must this bare-minimum gesture of common decency be treated as one of the film’s primary selling points? Surely audiences want to hear a pitch for a movie that’s better than, “Come see it — we’re not racists!”

And confoundingly, despite its significance from a sociocultural standpoint, the race-appropriate casting in this West Side Story is matched by a distinct slackening in all-around charisma. Even with strong performances by Zegler, Ariana DeBose, David Alvarez, and especially Mike Faist, there’s no scene in this movie that isn’t acted or directed just as well, if not better in the original. Screenwriter Tony Kushner spends a lot of time fleshing out the psychology of the lead Puerto Rican characters (most notably the previously-underdrawn Chino, here played with anxious solemnity by Josh Andres Rivera), but this comes at the expense of the supporting Sharks and Jets.

One of the feats of the Robbins-Wise film is that you spend a lot of time with all the kids, so they become quite familiar over its two-and-a-half hour runtime. Watching Spielberg’s version, I felt like I was still bumping into new faces at the two-hour mark.

This psychoanalyzing also detracts from the film’s central love story. Taken at face value, Tony and Maria’s romance is patently absurd: they meet at a dance, and later that night proclaim their eternal love to one another. The next day, he kills her brother; then she sleeps with and agrees to run away with him. But Kushner’s efforts to render this chain of events “realistic” (e.g., having the characters go on a date, giving Tony a heavy backstory) only undermine it. In the original version, Natalie Wood and Richard Breymer project an otherworldly, almost airhead dreaminess as the star-crossed lovers — and they’re aided by Robert Wise’s abstract filming of key scenes, like their meeting at the gym.

West Side Story is founded and structured upon the intensity of teenage emotions. By eliminating the highest highs from their source material, Spielberg and Kushner end up robbing it of its very soul. As someone who adores classic Hollywood movies, I’ve found that this is one of the tricks to engaging with Old School styles of storytelling: once you attempt to out-reason their more fantastical elements, the magic fades. It’s one thing to critique or revise past masterpieces for their prejudicial follies — it’s another thing altogether to condescend to them.

To my eyes, though everything about this movie is intended to be progressive, making another film of West Side Story actually looks like a backwards step. What made the musical so urgent during its initial Broadway run was the fact that it was set in the present-day. Its audience left the theater to find themselves facing the very reality that had just been represented onstage. To retell the same story — without updating its time period, as Arthur Laurents did with Shakespeare’s play — reduces it so that the work feels like just another costume drama about the injustices of the past, e.g. The Help, Hidden Figures, Green Book, etc.

Perhaps this limitation reveals a weakness in the phenomenon of Steven Spielberg: always one to meet the audience where they’re at, he’s never really summoned himself to take a big creative risk. Sure, he’s capitalized on technological developments to deliver spectacular visual effects over the course of his career, but he’s not the passionate innovator that Jerome Robbins was — nor is he the mass-educator of public TV that was Leonard Bernstein, nor the formal experimenter that was Stephen Sondheim.

Imperfect though it may be, West Side Story was created by four politically-conscious men who sought to push the proverbial envelope, whereas Spielberg is too busy fussing to make sure it has the proper postage.

If he really wanted to revive this musical, if he was devoted to recreating its power, then Spielberg could have collaborated with a Latine writer to tell a new story about the contemporary experiences of immigrant New Yorkers. In a world where so many voices remain unheard, the opportunity is ripe for a man of his stature to erect a platform upon which he might help a new speaker take center stage.

Ultimately, the great director has done nothing wrong — and West Side Story is a competent if unnecessary remake of an American classic. And yet, strangely, it’s the fact that there’s nothing “wrong” with it that keeps this film from being anything more than merely “right.”