There’s a moment of quiet in the 1961 “West Side Story” that I think about often. Immediately after the climactic bloodshed of the film, we find Maria – a young Hispanic woman – on the rooftop of her apartment. She is awaiting Tony, her white lover who has, unbeknownst to her, just committed a murder. She begins to dance on the rooftop, a shadow of the dance steps she first performed a few days earlier when she first met him. It’s a moment of sustained privacy and silence as she travels the lengths of the rooftop until she is interrupted by a visitor. But not the one she expects. It is an emissary with a string of bad news. And with that, the narrative unspools into the tragedy of its final act.
That brief moment, Maria’s desperate clinging to that private dreamscape and the rude interruption of the real world outside, masterfully represents the larger thesis of “West Side Story”: a story that depends on the rupture between public and private. The two lovers at the centre try to keep their love a secret, at the start, foolishly thinking their private devotion can remain unaffected by the public enmity around them. The mounting crises reach their crescendo when the private clashes with the public, leaving dead bodies in the wake. And I kept wondering, after watching and re-watching the new adaptation of “West Side Story,” why the weight of the conflict felt so absent. In some ways, it feels unfair to begin a consideration of this new adaptation by invoking its predecessor, and yet the weight of legacies and antecedents feels baked into this new version.
The energetic thrills of the original film are a high bar to scale, but as a dramaturgical work “West Side Story” is so thoughtfully calibrated that any version of it – with that music, those lyrics, and that libretto – will be compelling enough to demand your attention. And, I’ll admit even as I missed the 1961’s version colourful intertitle-sequence and energetic opening shots, I was intrigued by the initial desultory seriousness of this new version where Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner immediately reveal their central foci: externalising every private moment, literalising every symbol, and privileging a quasi-realism as the central approach to the story. None of these really work completely, but the opening at least makes the possibility of an intriguing beginning with a reference to contemporary repercussions.
One of the first things we see in this world, by way of an intimidating crane-shot observing a rubble-filled lot, is a site under construction, soon to be fitted with a shiny new surface to announce its new name: “The Lincoln Center”. In a film that will soon choose to literalise and externalise every potentially moment of subtlety the weight of this framing works, despite its obviousness. That Kushner and Spielberg choose to frame the tale of fighting against the realisation that both groups – the poor white Jets and the poor Hispanic Sharks – are being forced out of the cultural milieu of New York feels, at least, like a choice that offers something to explain their interest in the story. But things begin to feel awry early on. The taut energy of the feud between the Jets and the Sharks depends on the potential carnage that hangs in the balance. The union between Tony (best-friend to Riff, who is the new leader of the Jets) and Maria (sister to Bernardo, who is leader of the Sharks) turns that taut energy into something explosive, the final nudge to turn hostility into real bloodshed. Typically, we wait with anticipation, for the inevitable physical altercations that will define the later parts of the story. But when Kushner and Spielberg have the Jets and the Sharks exchange actual blows in the film’s opening sequence, the “realism” of this “West Side Story” already begins to feel incongruous.
In 1957, the musical play “West Side Story” rejiggered Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” from Verona to New York, turning it from a tale of duelling families into a tale of duelling gangs (the Jets and the Sharks), and the two lovers from opposing sides that set a chain of tragic events in motion. The first film adaptation would follow in 1961, then a string of revivals on Broadway (and internationally), and most recently the new film adaptation in 2021 directed by Spielberg. Although Shakespeare’s original lovers spend some minutes rejecting naming (famously querying “What’s in a name?”), the lovers in “West Side Story” devote a lot of time to learning each other’s names and revelling in them. So much so that the first ardent moment of love realised in “West Side Story” is a song titled after a name. Early on, reluctant gang-member Tony, a Jet, delivers his soliloquy in song, “Maria”, to the woman that he has become newly fascinated with. Even as we may wince at the ways that the young lovers give way to their emotions and libido, it’s important that the romance at the centre of the story establish itself with sincerity. In the 1961 film, Jerome Robbins (who conceived the stage show) and Robert Wise present Tony’s aria to “Maria” with the sanctity of a prayer, a moment of private devotion. Upon learning the name of his beloved, Tony waltzes through the street in a stupor. Even if we remain doubtful about the strength of the love, the film never wavers. This love is serious business, for them at least.
In the new “West Side Story”, the rendering of this moment feels like a window into recognising the contours of this newer version of the story. And it’s an early sign of a film that feels unevenly yoked to its source material. In Spielberg’s “Story”, Ansel Elgort’s Tony strides through the streets, singing of his love for “Maria”. But here, he is allowed no privacy to extol the virtues of his beloved. Instead, in a trope that Kushner’s screenplay repeats throughout, the moment of privacy is interrupted. The moment is reimagined not as a soliloquy, but an earnest call in search of her. So, he strides through the Puerto Rican neighbourhood calling out. Listening children look on, amused. Tired women wince at his performance of ardour. In the moment, more distracting than amusing. It is as if the film is uncomfortable with taking this expression of love in earnest and is, instead, insistent on undercutting any sincerity. The moment, like other later ones, reveals a “West Side Story” that feels trapped between duelling timelines. Like the source and original film, it is set in mid-century New York retaining the economic anxiety of the era, but every moment feels punctuated by contemporary sensibilities, concerns and apprehension, as if unwilling to give way too much to the sensibilities of the past.
In some ways, this duality feels inevitable. The 1961 film, a feat of capital ‘M’ Movie Making has endured as one of the technical masterpieces of big-budget musicals even as it retains its own dubious issues. The dual contributions of Hollywood director Robert Wise and Broadway choreographer Jerome Robbins as co-directors on the film gave it an extra-shot of energy that few have been able to surpass. But, despite the technical marvel, the celebrated performances, including the much-vaunted performance of Puerto Rican Rita Moreno as Anita, the film featured non-Latinx performers as the Puerto Rican Sharks, American Natalie Wood as Maria and American and Greek George Chakiris as Bernardo. One immediate focus of this new adaptation is its authentically cast performers, with Latinx performers of all ethnicities as the Sharks. This new “West Side Story” seeks to present an updated version of the familiar story for a modern time, dutifully aware of the potentially dubious aspects of the original and intent on recalibrating them for the now. The ethnic accuracy is an important and welcome change. More complicated, though, is the contemporary attempt to engage with the darker underbelly of the urban and ethnic fatigue lurking beneath the story which feels at odds with the material.
In its search for realism, Spielberg’s first musical film is visibly concerned with ensuring that every moment is emphasised for the possibility of the spectacular. It’s a direct rejection of the stagey affections of Robbins and Wise’s film. The buildings, the rubble, the sets feel huge and real. But bigger, when it is equated with explication, isn’t always effective. Certainly, movies excel when they are able to lean into the spectacle of the visual, and musicals depend on this. And “West Side Story”, at least superficially, retains that awareness with the instinctively spectacular. Spielberg shepherds his creative team towards moments that emphasise the things that go big. But the work from Janusz Kamiński, Spielberg’s long-time cinematography partner, doesn’t always feel in sync with the requirements of the story. It looks spectacular, particularly in wide-shots that command the gravity of the largeness of the city, but the digital glares of the film’s aesthetics make for some jarring lighting effects, especially in close-ups where faces – so important for a story like this – feel too shiny and smooth and unblemished, losing the specificity of interiority.
The limits of the film’s approach to close-ups feel fitting for its rejection of privacy. In this new version, the men and women of the Sharks spill into the street for a rousing rendition of “America” that’s so spectacular it stops traffic. Literally. Pedestrians and drivers, of all colours, stop to cheer them on in excitement. It’s a far cry from the original iteration of the number. The “America” number typically functions as a private moment of tension-relief after the neighbourhood dance where the two gangs attend, and where Maria and Tony unwittingly begin a romance that proves fateful on both ends. But my scepticism here is less about devoted fidelity to a source, than in a lingering questioning of whether Kushner and Spielberg’s sensibilities really work for this story. Any adaptation that attempts big swings at its source is impressive for the confidence, but Kushner’s approach to adaptation in “West Side Story” feels incongruous with the text. Kushner’s theatrical work has often been littered with characters who speak virtuosically, and with fervour, literalising their pain in speeches about real world issues. But, that kind of sociological shrewdness feels unnatural for “West Side Story,” which nods to real world problems, but at its centre is about the small acts of desperation in these young characters clinging to their ways of life.
With Kushner, though, Spielberg’s film is tied to real world issues with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. So, the private becomes public, the subtext becomes test, and the metaphorical becomes literal. But it’s one step from literalism to obviousness. By choosing to literalise every effect, Spielberg and Kushner all but shout at the audience their worry that we are not savvy enough or discerning enough to understand. Or, take great pains to explicitly point out ways to make characters less morally dubious. In few moments, like the opening, the literalism finds a way to be meaningful. In some cases, it feels effortful but still thoughtful like the reframing of the lovers’ duet on Maria’s fire-escape, built like the bars of a jail with her and Tony on either side struggling to embrace (we get it, the lovers from duelling gangs are fated to be separated).
But in most cases, the literalism feels craven. In “America”, the Sharks argue as to the pros and cons of an American life. Even as the weighty lyrics tell us everything in specific poetic language, the camera insists on showing it to us to emphasise and then re-emphasise what we can already discern. It’s hard to muster up true excitement or fascination when the work itself feels so self-consciously uncertain of its own worth. Worse yet, a late scene where Anita must identify Bernardo’s body tearfully, feels ungracefully unwieldy, pushing Ariana DeBose to dramatic lengths that she can’t quite navigate. DeBose as Anita is compelling in group numbers, an expert dancer with the confidence of a trained stage performer. In close-ups, she’s less confident. A recurring quality in the cast. The young cast are fine, but there’s a sheen of performativity to their work here that I’m unwilling to hold them accountable for, as it feels more in line with the film’s approach to this story, which demands literalising everything. So, Maria must explicate the ways she is an independent woman, and not some image of female piety. Chino, the Puerto Rican beau that her brother insists she marry, must be a budding scholar rather than just a member of a gang. Tony must disavow Riff with an aggressiveness that unsettles the way their fates play out. The characters must speak to the racism of the day with language that feels more in line with contemporary critiques than that of the era. The contemporary approach to this material feels incompatible with the content, and so this “West Side Story” rarely feels like a work that might spontaneously exist in the “now;” instead it feels like a “response” tethered to the weight of what came before.
This approach makes for a film that feels like it exists at cross-purposes. One side of it performs the liveliness of a big-budget musical, in astonishing colour and exuberant sound design, but the other side of it retains a self-conscious affectation as if obsequiously compelled to concede that the source material is inherently filled with problems. This might be so, but then, why this exuberant devotion to this source? For good, or for ill, the structure of “West Side Story” as a play is so inextricably linked to its characterisations and its music that it’s not the kind of work best served by a straight adaptation by way of critique. Kushner seems to be full of both adulation and hesitancy for the original film, and it’s a mixture that serves the adaptation poorly. It never feels natural, but like a palimpsest; at each turn it seems to invoke its predecessors, asking us to read the new changes in context. One key update is the addition of the widow Valentina (played by Rita Moreno) as a Puerto Rican shop-owner Tony works for. Here, his pursuit of Maria is predicated on Valentina’s own marriage to her white husband, Doc. But this addition complicates the story in a way the film never recovers from. This Tony, an ex-con on the mend, is so steeped in his adulation of racial harmony that his friendship with Jets-leader Riff never feels sincere, and with that relationship punctured, the dual murder at the film’s climax feels more utilitarian than emotional. When Richard and Beymer and Russ Tamblyn tussled in 1961, the stakes seemed lower but the rapport felt assured.
Ansel Elgort has earned the less ardent critiques of the main cast, but the problem with Tony in this rendering lies beyond him. Elgort is generally fine, and retains an earnest cadence that mostly works for the romance, although there’s never a moment where he seems like a boy who would believably lead the Jets in the way that Mike Faist’s Riff does. But it’s more than that. Here, his first song, an ambivalent look to the future in “Something Coming,” is observed by Valentina. Robbed of that moment of aloneness to consider his future, Tony feels less a figure trying to figure out his world, and more like a device for this new film to give Moreno’s character an arc. The imminent romance feels defanged. Why do Maria and Tony find each other fascinating? The question has plagued audiences for half a century. But even if you didn’t believe it in 1961, there’s no argument that Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise do, and the lustful chemistry of Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood highlight that. And that version’s recognition that prosaic realism would only interrupt the youthful naiveté of that relationship is an important reason that the moment where the two lovers see each other for the first time, where time seems to stop, feels so explosive. That meeting is one of a few moments where Spielberg’s film feels emphatically limp. It’s confident and visually striking (and it really does sound great), but the realistic approach where Maria and Tony simply meet face-to-face behind bleachers feels punctured. There’s no grandiose or swooning energy of a love that feels momentous. It’s just another day in their lives They seem to doubt their own ardour. But if the film never deigns to consider anything in this romance as earth-shattering, then the tragedy that comes moves from high tragedy to bathos. Kushner’s script is so consumed with externalising his emotions and to let us know that he knows that this is problematic that the film never really sits with itself to let these characters merely exist. And it makes me wonder. Why “West Side Story” in 2021? Why engage with this tale when at every turn you feel uncertain about what it is?
In their effort to make a version of “West Side Story” that course-corrects the more dubious aspects of the original, one wonders whether Spielberg and Kushner stopped to think if what was needed was a version of 2021 or a 2021 version of a different story that only nods to this one. There’s never a moment in this story that feels like an earnest tale that would unfold unencumbered from these creators. Instead, every moment feels punctuated by the weight of the past – whether in deference, or in an attempt at solving it. It can’t have it all, the competing sides feel unresolved and, in its wake, this new “West Side Story” feels too hollow.
