West Side Story sits near the pinnacle of post-World War II American middlebrow culture. First performed on Broadway in 1957 and brought to the screen four years later, it survives as both a time capsule and a reservoir of imperishable songs. What its creators attempted — a swirling fusion of literary sophistication and contemporary social concern, of playfulness and solemnity, of realism and fantasy, of street fighting and ballet — hadn’t quite been attempted before, and hasn’t been matched since.
The idea of harnessing the durable tragedy of Romeo and Juliet to the newsy issues of juvenile delinquency and ethnic intolerance must have seemed, to Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim, both audacious and obvious. In the years since, West Side Story has proved irresistible — to countless high-school musical theatre programs and now to Steven Spielberg, whose film version reaffirms its indelible appeal while making it feel bold, surprising and new.
This isn’t to say that the show has ever been perfect. Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics (and who died just after Thanksgiving at 91), frequently disdained his own contributions, including the charming I Feel Pretty. The depiction of Puerto Rican and Anglo (or “gringo”) youth gangs has been faulted for sociological imprecision and cultural insensitivity. Shakespeare’s Verona might not translate so easily into the slums of mid-20th-century Manhattan.
But perfection has never been a relevant standard for musicals. The genre has always been a glorious, messy mash-up of aesthetic transcendence and commercial ambition, a grab-bag of styles and sources held together by the energy, ingenuity and sheer chutzpah of scrappy and resourceful artistes. This may be especially true at the movies, where the technology of cinema can enhance and also complicate the artistry.
Spielberg’s version, with a screenplay by Tony Kushner that substantially revises Laurents’s book and new choreography by Justin Peck that pays shrewd tribute to Robbins’s genius, can’t be called flawless. The performances are uneven. The swooning romanticism of the central love story doesn’t always align with the roughness of the setting. The images occasionally swerve too bumpily from street-level naturalism to theatrical spectacle. The seams — joining past to present, comedy to tragedy, America to dreamland — sometimes show.
But those seams are part of what makes the movie so exciting. It’s a dazzling display of film-making craft that also feels raw, unsettled and alive. Rather than embalming a classic with homage or aggressively reinventing it, Spielberg, Kushner, Peck and their collaborators (including the cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, the production designer Adam Stockhausen, the editors Sarah Broshar and Michael Kahn and the composers Jeanine Tesori and David Newman) have rediscovered its breathing, thrilling essence.
The 1961 movie, directed by Robbins and Robert Wise, was partly filmed on location in a neighbourhood that was already vanishing. In Spielberg’s 1957, the destruction is well underway. Wrecking balls and cranes tower over piles of smashed masonry that were once tenement buildings. A sign posted at one of the demolition sites shows a rendering of the shiny Lincoln Centre arts complex that will rise where the slums once stood.
This West Side Story is explicitly historical, grounded in a specific moment in New York City’s past. Kushner has brought a level of scholarly care to the screenplay far beyond what Laurents and the others were able or willing to muster.
Shakespeare’s play supposes “two households, both alike in dignity”; in Act III, Mercutio famously calls down “a plague” on both of them. But such symmetry, while structurally necessary to the source material — who were the Montagues and Capulets, anyway, and who really cares? — doesn’t map easily onto the West Side as Kushner and Spielberg understand it.
The Jets and the Sharks, a white teenage gang and their Puerto Rican antagonists, aren’t mirror images of each other. Ostensibly contending for control over a few battered blocks in the West 60s, they collide like taxis speeding toward each other on a one-way street.
The Sharks are children of an upwardly striving, migrant working class, a generation (or less) removed from mostly rural poverty in the Caribbean and determined to find a foothold in the imperial metropolis, where they are greeted with prejudice and suspicion. Bernardo (David Alvarez), their leader, is a boxer. His girlfriend, Anita (Ariana DeBose), works as a seamstress, while his younger sister, Maria (Rachel Zegler), toils on the night shift as a cleaner at Gimbels department store. Chino (Josh Andres Rivera), who Bernardo and Anita believe would be a good match for Maria, is a bespectacled future accountant. (But of course Maria falls for Tony, a reluctant Jet played by the heartthrobby Ansel Elgort.) All of them have plans, aspirations, dreams. The violence of the streets is, for Bernardo, a necessary and temporary evil, something to be overcome through hard work and communal cohesion on the way to something better.
The Jets, by contrast, are the bitter remnant of an immigrant cohort that has, for the most part, moved on — to the Long Island suburbs and the bungalows of Queens, to a share of post-war prosperity. As the policemen Officer Krupke (Brian D’Arcy James) and Lieutenant Schrank (Corey Stoll) are on hand to explain — and as the Jets themselves testify — these kids are the product of family dysfunction and societal neglect. Without aspirations for the future, they are held together by clannish loyalty and racist resentment — an empty sense of white entitlement and a perpetually expanding catalog of grievances. Their nihilism is embodied by Riff (the rangy Mike Faist), the kind of brawler who would rather fight than win.
As the song says: Life can be bright in America/If you can fight in America. But what lingers after this West Side Story is a darkness that seems to belong more to our own angry, tribal moment than to the (relatively) optimistic ’50s or early ’60s. The heartbreak lands so heavily because the eruptions of joy are so heady. The big comic and romantic numbers — Tonight, America and, yes, I Feel Pretty — burst with colour and feeling, and the silliness of Officer Krupke cuts like an internal satire of some of the show’s avowed liberal pieties.
The cast members — notably including Rita Moreno, who was Anita in 1961 and who returns as a weary, wise pharmacist named Valentina — bring exactly the sincerity and commitment that a movie like this requires. There’s a reason West Side Story is a staple of the performing arts curriculum, and for all the Hollywood bells and whistles, the essence of Spielberg’s version is a bunch of kids snapping their fingers and singing their hearts out.
The voices are, all in all, pretty strong. Zegler sings some of the most challenging numbers with full-throated authority, but she and Elgort don’t fully inhabit the grand, life-altering (and -ending) passion that their roles require. Tony and Maria are sweet and likable, but also a bit bland, and their whirlwind progress from infatuation to eternal devotion, which unfolds over a scant two days, feels shallow against the big, complicated forces moving around them.
This is partly a consequence of Kushner and Spielberg’s commitment to realism and historical nuance, and in some ways it works to the movie’s advantage. The centre of tragic gravity shifts away from Tony and Maria to Bernardo and Anita, and also to Riff. It helps that Alvarez, Faist and — supremely — DeBose are such magnetic performers. When DeBose is on screen, nothing else matters but what Anita is feeling. But the characters also have a deeper, more complicated stake in the story. They aren’t just foils or catalysts for the action, as their counterparts are in Shakespeare. They are the ones for whom the question of what it is to be in America becomes a matter of life and death.
The New York Times News Service
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West Side Story is now playing in movie theatres
WEST SIDE STORY (U/A)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler, Ariana DeBose, David Alvarez, Mike Faist, Rita Moreno
Running time: 156 minutes
