West Side Story
Steven Spielberg, PG, 156min
★★★★
Steven Spielberg has something of the same endless facility as Paul McCartney or Mozart: he can do it all so well, and make it all look so easy, that it can sometimes slip his mind to ask “Why?” Just because one can play the trombone while unicycling down the nave of a cathedral doesn’t mean one should. It is entirely possible to sit through his remake of West Side Story — admire its sweep, thrill to its collision of bodies, swoon over its leads and snap one’s fingers to the extraordinary set list of absurdly famous songs by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim — and still exit the cinema not exactly sure why the film exists, exactly. It’s dazzling, in the same way that Lego cities or spacewalks are dazzling: purely so, for its own dazzling sake. Just because it can.
The most pressing reason for its existence feels autobiographical. Spielberg made a few passes at the musical in the early part of his career, with the swing dance in 1941 and the opening number, Anything Goes, from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Which makes West Side Story something of a bucket list achievement: he’s ticking off all the unchecked dreams of his youth. If Catch Me If You Can summoned the glamour of early jet travel, and Bridge of Spies did the Cold War to perfection, West Side Story, if nothing else, gives us one more chance to drink in the numinous glow of Spielberg’s 1950s: the pink Cadillacs! The shop signage! The soda jerks! The Nu Yoik accents! Even the sunlight, through the lens of his longtime cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, seems exactly the same chalky sunlight that bathed the tenements of New York in Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s 1961 Oscar-winning original.
Tony Kushner’s screenplay restirs the pot of racial tensions that animated the original: strewn with rubble and barbed wire, the Upper West Side of this film looks more like a set from one of Spielberg’s wartime epics. And it was a nice touch to have the Jets, led by Riff (Mike Faist) deface a Puerto Rican flag mural with paint cans, as if in homage to Jackson Pollock.
The plot is Romeo and Juliet for the era of Brando. At the high school dance Tony (Ansel Elgort) catches his first glimpse of Maria (Rachel Zegler) and despite the disapproval of Maria’s brother, Bernardo (David Alvarez), love finds a way, up a fire escape, where Maria and Tony sing Tonight while the camera shins up there with them. Going low for the rumbles and high for the big dance numbers, Spielberg’s camera shows its usual exquisite touch when it comes to unlocking hearts: posing his lovers against stained glass, or the lights of a bandstand, he silhouettes and haloes them with lens flares, the same way he did Elliott and ET — as if Tony and Maria’s romance, too, were out of this world.
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Like many people I’d harboured doubts about Elgort, but his old-school smouldering is perfect for Tony, and his remarkably pure tenor combines beautifully with Zegler’s songbird soprano — during One Hand, One Heart their voices, as much as their hands, intertwine like doves.
Zegler adds a touch of fire to Maria — she gets called “bossy” a lot by her brother — although the character comes apart at the exact same point she did in the original: hot on the heels of finding out that Tony has killed her nearest and dearest family member, she has to shrug it off and melt into Tony’s arms, because “When loves comes so strong/ there is no right or wrong”. Huh? The idea of sacrificing your family because your boyfriend is such a dish plays even worse today than it did in 1961 — it’s a resounding dead note — which brings us back to the question of why exactly Spielberg made this film.
The other film of his that West Side Story most resembles, strangely, is Lincoln, which was also scripted by Kushner; another American icon dusted off from the display cabinet and given a handsome variorum edition.
Spielberg has added grit, some unsubtitled Spanish, and asked Rita Moreno, who played Anita in the original film, to make one of those the-legend-lives cameos, like Spock in Star Trek: Into Darkness, that acts as a Ronseal guarantee of authenticity. Kushner brings out the conscientious side of Spielberg: the good boy who double-checks his homework, not the little terror who uses it to make paper darts.
Having launched the blockbuster with Jaws and taken it global with Jurassic Park — one of its first casualties being, funnily enough, the musical — he seems intent on teaching his younger self some respect. Those old buildings mean something. His West Side Story is not for young punks, really, but for all the 74-year-old juvenile delinquents out there.