Remaking the original West Side Story, the cherished, seminal 1961 musical riff on Romeo and Juliet hailed with a staggering 10 Academy Awards, was always going to be a daunting task, even with the lustrous pedigree of acclaimed directing veteran Steven Spielberg. The baseline incentives are certainly present: The lyrics, per se, for an update are quite discernable and exceedingly valid, but what remained opaque is the music to truly cement its artistic merit, that divine essence of enduring storytelling.
West Side Story is sacred text that echoes a youthful verve that has reverberated throughout generations, timeless in its aesthetic and performative veneers, but congruent with many of this type, its roots are also inherently antiquated. The film’s depiction of two warring street gangs of different ethnic backgrounds, the white Jets and Puerto Rican Sharks, as they contend for what they deem as control of Manhattan’s West Side can’t help but skew as obtuse, facile and reductive under modern scrutiny, especially toward the latter demographic, not to mention the appalling use of brownface on lead actress Natalie Wood.
Spielberg notably finessed a bulbous mechanical shark into quintessential nerve-shredding cinema and the curious connection between a lonely boy and cryptic extra-terrestrial into an earnest fable of love’s power to heal, a venerable dexterity with a vast panorama of genres, but could he truly attain something of a distinctly different wavelength of loftiness, to reinvigorate material so firmly entrenched in the past? The answer is of resounding triumph, one that beguiles with the esteemed craftsman’s rugged emotional and visual acumen. For a filmmaker whose ethos has been predominantly defined by imbuing the fantastical with incisive perception, wallops of suspense and bountiful heart, such as animatronics that embody an oceanic specter of doom or a cosmic harbinger of melancholy, Spielberg pulses his latest work (and his best feature in over a decade) to soaring yet harrowing life with potent sociopolitical subtext.
The 2021 enrichment of West Side Story is a rapturous force of Technicolor splendor with its director somehow at both his most delicate and visceral, so ineffably majestic in its execution that it might as well be alchemy. Musicals are intrinsically cinematic, expressing elusive human truths through singular artifice, and with a sorcerer of not only comprehensive mastery of the form but also more modern sensibilities assuredly at the helm, the proceedings pulsate with classically pristine theatrics and a contemporary thematic gaze. It’s like a vigorous excavation as Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner exhume overly archaic material from the annals of entertainment history and gradually recontextualize it with swooning vitality.
“I’m gonna think for myself,” Maria (newcomer Rachel Zegler) asserts to her brother Bernardo (David Alvarez), leader of the Sharks, with an incredibly compelling blend of adolescent naivete and self-possessed poise, a crucial alteration that injects this version’s heroine with gripping fallibility and agency. The wide-eyed Maria seeks to forge her own path but can’t fully grasp the magnitude of her fraught, intolerant landscape as an immigrant; she’s so fixated on the rose-colored promise of America that its harsh realities elude her. Conversely, Bernardo, his fiancé Anita (Ariana DeBose) and the remainder of the Sharks vie with the Jets, headed by the menacing Riff (Mike Faist), for the scant remnants of a dwindling neighborhood, all of them grappling with burgeoning destitution on the already-pulverized horizon.
For all his boisterous showmanship, Spielberg encapsulates this timely conflict with a quietly chilling opening tracking shot that pans and sifts through a building’s rubble to underscore the achingly human ramifications spurred by New York City’s construction of the Lincoln Center-displacement encroaching upon any community without the means to evade the dominance of those in power that lacerates like the propulsive choreography. As you may have surmised if you have taken even a semblance of a literature or film class, Maria’s fulfilling yet impetuous (and quite forbidden, but you already knew that) romance with rehabilitated Jet Tony (Ansel Elgort) is the final domino to topple these two volatile factions into tumultuous war.
In partially supplanting its predecessor’s whimsy with simmering dramatic tension, West Side Story renders a sharply eclectic tapestry of the delirious fervor induced by systemic injustice, straddling fanciful exuberance and haunting devastation to an evocative degree. The film emulates a vibrant fever dream that seethes in moments of palpable catharsis and pure cinematic euphoria, almost like it’s surreally grappling with the neglected gray areas of centuries-worth of foundational art itself.
Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski pierces slightly muted tones with scintillating color in symphonic tandem with Kushner’s astute restructuring of the narrative. These trenchant choices immersively calibrate the film’s heady liminal space between fantasia and gritty realism, such as the mesmerizing love-at-first-sight interaction between Maria and Tony as the aesthetic toggles between their buoyant intimacy and the contentious setting of “The Dance at the Gym,” transforming “America” into a sweeping yet stimulating treatise on modern power dynamics, or deliberately placing the decadent “I Feel Pretty” after the calamitous brawl between the Jets and Sharks to illustrate the sobering turmoil and disillusionments of this sphere.
Beyond all its transcendent ingenuity, however, West Side Story embodies cinema at simply its most eloquent and resonant, marrying its juxtaposing conceits- impulsive romanticism as a wistful construct for nonexistent idealism and the ruinous circumstances and crippling strife of its milieu- with urgency that’s dually enchanting and heart-shattering, actualizing each character and arc with great nuance. Spielberg meticulously cultivates every minute frame with towering and dynamic clarity, his gargantuan command behind the camera enveloping you through sumptuous spectacle and subtle pathos. The dazzling cast is essential in this, most notably an ethereal and radiant Zegler, perhaps the definitive iteration of Maria; searing Faist, imbuing one of the most deplorable characters with emotional texture; and utterly magnetic and supremely emotive Debose, whose sheer screen presence could rejuvenate the weariest of souls.
“You should know better!” a distraught Maria laments to Anita in “A Boy Like That; I Have a Love,” polarized between her contrasting needs for escape and candor. In this indelible sequence, wrought with incredible incandescence by Zegler and Debose, two sentiments are fervently imparted: Never doubt Spielberg, who has retained the unfettered joy and poignancy that etched him in the Mount Rushmore of Hollywood decades ago, and the only way to reconcile with fractured relationships, insurmountable societal tribulation and (in a more meta sense) the transgressions of predecessors is to express oneself without hesitation and to uphold unwavering conviction and compassion. Is that not the eternal pith of this medium, to restore the dignity and grace of its subjects, all through the universal artistic language of otherworldly grandeur and blistering insights? West Side Story navigates these dreamy hills and bleak valleys with seamlessly figurative and literal precision of dance.
Grade: A
West Side Story is now available in theaters.
Photo Credit / 20th Century Studios
