West Side Story (2021)
(Anita (Ariana DeBose) and Bernardo (David Alvarez) dancing in West Side Story)
West Side Story (2021)
In this remake of the 1961 Oscar winning movie, Steven Spielberg, the director, and Tony Kushner, the screenwriter, have put street-level grit over spectacle. They’ve dared to take a beloved screen classic and rough it up a bit.
Grim reality comes to the fore in the opening shots, which are quite different from the sweeping, eye-of-God, shot-from-the sky opening of 1961. Here we’re first shown piles of rubble, then a battered West Side of Manhattan whose street signs tell us we’re in the West 60s.
That’s the location where the new Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts was soon to be built, and within the movie’s first minute, after scanning shots of buildings shelled out by wrecking balls, we see a sign reading “Slum Clearance” followed by a poster displaying the gleaming new Performing Arts structure soon to rise.
Blocks of the West Side are being bulldozed or abandoned, while crumbling buildings line the streets, and businesses and neighborhoods hang on, awaiting the bulldozers. The neighborhood looks as ravaged, and at night seems nearly as deserted, as a war zone.
That’s the point. There’s a war going on about just who is and isn’t American enough. We get our first up-close look at Riff (Mike Faist) and his white street gang, the Jets, as they deface a Puerto Rican flag, declaring that this neighborhood, though it’s being erased, is still their turf, and they’ll battle to control it. Their Puerto Rican gang neighbors, The Sharks, who live within the same few square blocks, aren’t about to surrender what they see as their claim to the neighborhood.
After an inter-gang dustup, the Sharks and their leader, Bernardo (David Alvarez), proudly sing “La Borinqueña” (Puerto Rico’s official anthem), and inform both the Jets and the local police precinct’s Lieutenant Schrank (Corey Stoll) that they aren’t going anywhere. We soon meet Bernardo’s girlfriend, Anita (Ariana DeBose), and his sister, Maria (Rachel Zegler), who’s newly arrived from Puerto Rico. Both women ardently wish that Bernardo would cool it with the gangster posturing.
We also meet Tony (Ansel Elgort), co-founder with Riff of the Jets, who’s severed his ties to the gang. He’s spent a year in prison for nearly ending the life of another kid not unlike himself. Now on probation, he keeps his nose clean working as a clerk in the drug store overseen by a kindly Puerto Rican widow, Valentina (Rita Moreno). She’s survived for decades in the neighborhood, long enough to understand that Caucasians and Puerto Ricans are fighting off despair even more profoundly than they’re busily hating each other, with a gentrifying city rapidly pushing them both aside.
Apart from Tony’s time in jail, which isn’t in the 1957 Broadway show or the 1961 movie, this is pretty much the approximation of West Side Story we might have expected.
But reimaginings of the show and the earlier movie are also in motion. Compared to 1961, the opening dance moves of the Jets and the Sharks look springier, less artful, earthier. The neighborhood’s slow erasure, the social crumbling, remains the underlying premise.
Indeed, the look and feel here don’t exactly mirror what the original creators intended. Working on Broadway in 1957, Leonard Bernstein (the composer), Arthur Laurents (the book author), Stephen Sondheim (the lyricist) and Jerome Robbins (the director and choreographer) were liberal idealists who wanted to shake up American musical theater.
By transforming Romeo and Juliet's Montagues and Capulets into contemporary street gangs waging turf warfare, they were “elevating” these NYC characters, endowing them with a near-Shakespearean solemnity.
And in co-directing the 1961 movie, Robbins and Robert Wise expanded on the show’s highly stylized urban dance moves to heighten, rather than simply depict, raw urban struggles. They were trying to topple audience pre-conceptions by giving the characters common, safely identifiable, aspirations.
Back then, the show and the movie contended that these weren’t feral “juvenile delinquents” out to maim or, if it came to that, kill one another. They were trapped youths who, if we looked closely enough, we could see were more than redeemable. They were beautiful.
Spielberg and Kushner, two 2020s liberal idealists, have a similar mission, but they've stripped away much of the originals’ ennobling artifice. Their blasted urban landscape appears on the edge of collapse. For all the vitality of youth on display, these characters seem desperate, close to exhaustion. They’re more aching than beautiful.
The movie’s choreographer, Justin Peck, does a remarkable job of fully honoring the lilt Robbins worked into his knifelike dance steps. Peck’s choreography is clean, even elegant, yet, unlike Robbins’, it springs more directly from cocky street rhythms. It’s more joyously athletic.
We recognize some of the dance moves from 1961. But, astonishingly, Peck has pared down Robbins’ archness and replaced it with a rough, working-class naturalness that’s moving in its simplicity and confidence. Peck never saddles the dancers’ movements with working-class “symbolism”. He keeps their moves rousing and earthbound, looking as if they’ve been thought up – seized – on the spot by the characters themselves.
(“The Dance at the Gym” in West Side Story)
His “The Dance at the Gym” may turn out to be one of movie history’s great musical numbers. Not totally relying on Robbins’ gorgeous exactitude, Peck lets each gang and their girlfriends ignite their own dance firestorms. To be sure, here as in 1961 each group is trying to “outdance” the other.
But more intriguingly, this time they’re also dancing to show that they don’t need to compete, that they form a complete reason to celebrate themselves, even if the opposing gang weren’t there. Peck subtly changes the number from a stark “contest” to a side-by-side show of musical, physical and emotional buoyancy. Dance for these young people isn’t a weapon, it’s a defiant character reference, flung down like a gauntlet. It’s affirmation as much as confrontation.
Until, that is, Tony and Maria spy one another across the dance floor, and the pair, transfixed, sneak off to talk and dance together behind a set of bleachers. Spielberg preserves the encounter’s feeling of enchantment from the 1961 version. Their gingerly dance moves and finger snaps are stylized, and the music takes on the rhythm of a mating ritual, charged with love at first sight and the barest hint of (still quite chaste) lust.
Bernardo comes upon the couple, angrily separates them and on explicit racial grounds, with the Sharks lined up behind him, warns the young gringo to leave Maria alone. Riff and the Jets leap to Tony’s defense, and before the evening is over both gangs agree that only a full-scale rumble can settle, once and for all, which gang will own the neighborhood turf.
(Riff (Mike Faist), Tony (Ansel Elgort) and Bernardo (David Alvarez) face off in West Side Story)
Thus, tragedy is set in motion. We’re not surprised when Tony climbs a fire escape to court Maria, and promises to prove his devotion if only she’ll take a short trip uptown with him the next day. On the subway, Tony promises Maria there won’t be a rumble.
Believing him, once they arrive at The Cloisters, Maria kneels before an altar, signals to Tony to do the same, and there, as in Shakespeare, the couple plight their troth. They enact, in song (“One Hand, One Heart”), what amounts to a wedding. Lit by stained glass, no less. How, we ask, do these two dumb kids imagine this is going to turn out?
We all know how it turns out, and Spielberg has done an inspired job of making the story’s set pieces fresh. The cinematography by longtime Spielberg collaborator Janusz Kaminski is pointedly theatrical. It’s Broadway hot in “The Dance at the Gym”. Then, come daylight, it brightly pops in “I Like to Be in America”, reimagined as a street scene with the whole Puerto Rican community joining in to satirize the hardships of survival in a country that’s less than welcoming.
We go on to watch Kaminski turn grimly German Expressionist in the violent encounters, including the rumble. The night scenes are marked by light without a clear source, thus made all the more eerie. Throughout, you feel Spielberg and Kaminski collaborating like dancers, one dashing and darting, the other silkily responding, in time.
The performances, too, are rhythmic and nuanced. Some of the finest work comes from Ariana DeBose as Anita. Moment to moment, she shifts deftly from Bernardo’s sultry longtime girlfriend to his mocking critic, wondering aloud where his macho posturing will lead him. When Bernardo disses Tony as a “dumb Polack”, Anita immediately chimes in with, “. . . says the Spic. Now you’re becoming a real American.”
As Riff, Mike Faist brings a keen sardonic edge to a character struggling to understand a changing world. He turns to violence because it’s the only certainty he can actually feel. Sadly, his leadership of the Jets grows ever more unyielding the more the violence he advocates intensifies, and finally spins out of control.
Faist’s dancing is superbly loose and exuberant in “The Dance at the Gym” and balletically assured in the reconceived “Cool” (here coming before, not after, the rumble), as he and Tony vie for control of the gun that ultimately becomes a talisman of honor for the Jets, and of retribution for the Sharks.
As the fated couple, Elgort and Zegler sweetly summon a wistful, youthful ache. Elgort’s singing strengthens as Tony’s dilemmas deepen. He thoughtfully mutes the earnestness of “Tonight” and thereby earns his quiet, meditative take on “Maria” (a song he explicitly asked Spielberg to let him sing live). Zegler has a winning smile and melting eyes, and her singing, especially on “Tonight”, enlivens her face even more.
(Tony (Ansel Elgort) and Maria (Rachel Zengler) sing “Tonight” in West Side Story)
Their affair spans all of two days and two nights, surely too brief a time to chart love’s ups and downs. For Maria and Tony, it’s all up, until it’s fatefully down. And both performers make inevitability feel not just heartbreaking but unjust, which is precisely what Laurents’ 1957 book, in adapting Shakespeare, asked of the characters. (The 1961 rendition of Tony and Maria’s heartrending “Somewhere” is here given to Valentina, interwoven with fade-ins of Tony and Maria’s faces, and feels like a missed opportunity, though Moreno sings it well.)
Alvarez makes a bristling Bernardo, always edgily ready for a fight (in this telling, beside leading the Sharks, he’s also a professional boxer). And in the almost wordless role of Anybodys, a girl who longs to be a part of the Jets’ male camaraderie, the trans nonbinary Iris Menas moves completely beyond the broad “tomboy” of 1961, into a stirring depiction of someone whose hunger to fit in eventually turns her into a vital witness.
Paul Tazewell’s costumes capture modest ’50s glamour, proving that for the canny working classes stylishness didn’t need to cost money. It’s the way the clothes are worn that makes the wearer stand out, and Tazewell doesn’t rely on over-researched “accuracy”. People readily strut, dance, rumble and love in these costumes, so the characters come alive in the clothes, not through any period “look” the movie is trying to recreate.
(Steven Spielberg (left) and Justin Peck (right) filming West Side Story)
Spielberg and Kushner dig deeper than the 1961 movie into the social currents of the 1950s. To a degree they’ve mimicked what theater – meaning drama, not musicals – was attempting throughout that decade to awaken audiences from a postwar malaise. Some of the dialogue Kushner has crafted here could have come from Arthur Miller or William Inge, which is to say, from the kitchen sink realism of 1950s playwriting devised to shake postwar audiences out of a widespread cultural complacency (including movie audiences watching pictures like Rebel Without a Cause or The Blackboard Jungle).
Spielberg is agile and freed up here in a way I can’t recall seeing him before. He’s a traditionalist, and this kind of apparent right vs. ostensible wrong storytelling is where he’s most comfortable. He doesn’t over assert. Yet he and Kushner have a firm vision. They want to see the inter-ethnic struggles of the 1950s newly respected. I think it’s a movie made for today, because, I’m guessing, he and Kushner fear we could be sinking back into those cruel divides. And who’s to say our outcomes will avoid the tragic? This 2021 West Side Story can’t help but cause us to ponder that urgent present-day question.