Film Review: West Side Story

Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler in Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s movie adaptation of West Side Story. Picture: Niko Tavernise © 2021 20th Century Studios

West Side Story opens nationwide on 10 December 2021.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Steven Spielberg’s much-anticipated – and, in some quarters, much dreaded – movie of West Side Story has finally reached cinemas. It’s the film I’ve been eagerly waiting for since about 1984: a full-blown musical by one of the all-time greatest directors. There can be few more frustrated Busby Berkeleys than Spielberg – check out his hilarious jitterbug sequence in 1941, the gorgeous ‘Anything Goes’ under the opening credits of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and his dynamic use of song in The Color Purple. Heck, even Close Encounters of the Third Kind has music at its core.

Now, a project that he was first associated with back in 2014 has come to fruition, and we can finally see how Spielberg handles that most tricky of genres: the movie musical.

Remaking West Side Story – ‘as sacred a cow movie as you are going to find’, according to the Hollywood news service Deadline – was always going to have its critics. But having just stepped out of the cinema, I’d argue that Spielberg’s movie is not a remake. Yes, it’s influenced by Robert Wise’s 1961 movie – that iconic straight-down aerial shot over the upper West Side of New York is here, for example, but this time the city is mid-destruction, as the camera swoops in alongside the wrecking balls to level the slums and make way for what would become the Lincoln Center. It’s less of a remake and more of a redefining: Spielberg has taken the original Broadway material and crafted his own spectacular cinematic adaptation.

That opening scene sums up the movie. It’s darker, grittier, more realistic; everything’s covered in brick dust, and the costumes (bravo designer Paul Tazewell) may be colour coded but they’re also ragged, sweat-stained and lived-in. The virtually all-new screenplay by Tony Kushner ramps it all up: the class and racial tensions, the sense of desperation and the true horrors of gang warfare. It has all the elements of Arthur Laurents’ original story but edged with the razor-wire identity politics of the 2020s. (The handling of Anybodys, the wannabe Jet depicted as a tomboy in 1961, is to be applauded, with the disenfranchised trans character searingly portrayed by the nonbinary actor Iris Menas.)

Ariana DeBose and David Alvarez in West Side Story. Picture: Niko Tavernise © 2021 20th Century Studios

This big screen version is, of course, impeccably made, as you’d expect from a director of Spielberg’s calibre. You just know that only the best creatives in Hollywood have been engaged to make this movie.

It sounds expensive, or at least it did in the shiny new Odeon Luxe cinema in Leicester Square, where I and other members of The Stephen Sondheim Society were treated to an advance screening. The prologue, with the gang whistles echoing around you in sonic 3D, was spine-tingling. And there’s not just one world-class Philharmonic orchestra on offer but two, namely the New York and Los Angeles, conducted by the nearest thing that classical conductors have to a rock star, Gustavo Dudamel. Absolutely no faulting Bernstein’s (thankfully un-mucked-about-with) music.

Visually, it’s a feast too. Spielberg’s go-to director of photography is the Academy-Award-winning Janusz Kamiński – the cinematographer responsible for Schindler’s List, and who gave Saving Private Ryan its gut-wrenching realism. Every one of Spielberg’s beautifully composed shots is sumptuous and rich with whatever the 1950s photographic equivalent of painterly is, bathed in an almost-unreal colour and light. It’s hallucinatory and dreamlike, a grim fairytale bursting with lens flares when it’s not lurking in the shadows. Gorgeous.

I found the choreography just as dazzling as the cinematography. The New York City Ballet’s resident choreographer and artistic advisor, Justin Peck – clearly inspired by Jerome Robbins – retains the finger-snapping coolness of the original but, like Kushner, dials it all up. It’s more filmic than the original choreo, which, as wonderful and as iconic as it was, I’d always felt was limited by the bounds of the proscenium, even on screen. The result is that it’s even more dizzying, breathtaking and inventive. ‘America’ spills out on to the litter-strewn Manhattan streets for a magical-realism block party; ‘I Feel Pretty’ is a riot of colour relocated to the department store where Maria works as a cleaner (polishing the ‘Charming’ mannequin display, thus neatly justifying Sondheim’s ‘alarming/charming’ rhyme); and the ingenious staging of ‘Cool’ – and yes, I think ‘staging’ is still the right word – gives the number a deeper, more dramatic purpose.

The performances, then. Rachel Zegler shines brightly as the santa Maria and is sure to win awards for best newcomer. She has wide-eyed innocence and fragility, but also an underlying fierceness. And a sweet soprano voice that is all hers. No dubbing here, or in fact anywhere in the cast, apparently. (Jeanine Tesori, of Fun Home and Caroline, or Change fame, is credited as the supervising vocal producer.)

Zegler is nicely paired with the pleasantly voiced Ansel Elgort as Tony, and their tropical-storm romance feels believable. Kushner has cleverly written Tony as fresh from a year in jail, after nearly killing a rival gang member, and Elgort captures the character’s hollowness, which gives way to hope as he realises that love has the power to change him, to help his escape from the inescapable. A couple of my Sondheim Society chums felt that Elgort was a tad bland or stiff, but I totally bought into his tabula-rasa characterisation of the lovestruck Jet enlightened by love and ready for a new life.

Mike Faist in West Side Story. Picture: Niko Tavernise © 2021 20th Century Studios

The movie’s scene stealer, though, is Ariana DeBose as Anita: feisty, passionate, sexual and fizzing with energy. Already a Broadway force to be reckoned with, DeBose deserves her career to skyrocket after this powerful performance. She has the onerous task – which she more than pulls off – of following in the footsteps of the 1961 Anita, Rita Moreno, who was on hand to give advice during filming, appearing as she does in the role of Valentina, a new character introduced by Kushner. It’s a joy to see the octogenarian star on the big screen, and she gets given the gift of singing ‘Somewhere’, which makes total sense in Kushner’s rewrite – the first time that this number has ever worked for me dramatically.

The other stand-out is Mike Faist, who plays the Jets’ wiry deputy leader, Riff. The original Connor Murphy in Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway, Faist gives an incendiary performance, and his knife fight with Bernardo (the also very convincing David Alvarez) is shocking and devastating. I, and a number of people around me, were in tears from this scene until the end.

I concluded from the heaving sobs around the cinema that this West Side Story has the power to move you in a way that the original movie – and even some of the best staged versions – can’t. There’s no escaping the fact that the 1961 film is a landmark in cinematic and musical history, and that it signified a sea change in how musical theatre could be writ large. It’s much loved, and its fans are rightly protective of its place in the pantheon.

But it’s not going anywhere. If you want to enjoy Wise’s ten-time Oscar winner, then just do it. These two interpretations of the show are not mutually exclusive. The mark of a good drama is its malleability, and the very best material can be interpreted again and again, with each new telling exposing something new, and hopefully revealing its joys to a new generation. There were faults with the 1961 movie – not least the black-facing – that justify a remake. But don’t think of Spielberg’s West Side Story as a makeover or an apology. It’s the retelling of a timeless story by one of the greatest artists in the history of cinema. And anyway, just listen to that music – it’s never sounded better.

Sondheim himself was hugely supportive of the project, as he confirmed to Stephen Colbert on his CBS show early in September. “It’s terrific! Everybody go – you’ll have a good time!” he laughed. “The whole thing has real sparkle to it, and real energy. And it feels fresh… Movie musicals are hard to do and Spielberg and Kushner really nailed it.”

Craig Glenday