There’s a thin line between destruction and reconstruction in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. Much of the film finds two rival gangs, the Sharks and the Jets, scrambling across a New York City demolition zone of crumbled buildings and jagged debris that would become Lincoln Center. The site may be the future of a gentrified, West Side arts capital, but it’s also, for now, a quasi-apocalyptic wasteland. “There’s dust on everything,” says Riff (Mike Faist), the half-crazed leader of the Jets, surveying the basement storeroom that his friend Tony’s (Ansel Elgort) been living in, but it’s a description—even a philosophy—that could apply to much of Spielberg’s vision for the world these gangs fight for and fight over.
In a neighborhood that seems to be physically splintering and shrinking, the white community, exemplified by the Jets, feels a desperate need to preserve the turf that they claim as home: There’s a place for us, they argue, but not for all of us. It’s telling that, in this adaptation, we see the Jets stealing from Puerto Rican-owned stores and vandalizing property long before they confront anyone from the Sharks, who aren’t the only enemy—just the members of their community who’re willing to fight back against this racial violence.
If, in 1957, West Side Story’s creators landed on whites and Puerto Ricans as a timely refitting of the Capulets and Montagues of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner strive to affix the story more firmly and meaningfully in its time and place. Before a single line of Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics is heard, the Sharks sing the original revolutionary lyrics of “La Borinqueña,” Puerto Rico’s national anthem, as they depart a confrontation with the Jets. Indeed, echoing the 2009 bilingual Broadway revival, much of the film’s dialogue between Puerto Rican characters is in unsubtitled Spanish, a move clearly meant to rebalance the power of the storytelling, decentering the Jets’ native language.
Kushner has also made West Side Story’s Romeo and Juliet, Tony (Ansel Elgort) and Maria (Rachel Zegler), more fully detailed characters by providing them with backstories: Tony has just gotten out a year-long prison sentence for almost murdering a Puerto Rican teenager, and Maria has spent the past five years caring for her father alone, waiting to join her brother, Bernardo (David Alvarez), in New York. This new West Side Story, then, is nothing if not thoughtful, each shot luminously, artfully sculpted, each new line of dialogue (Arthur Laurents’s original script has largely been replaced) critically positioned.
But Spielberg’s film also feels, with a few extraordinary exceptions, dispassionate: too zoomed-out and epically sprawling to ride the desperate urgency of a days-long, sudden love story or to harness the stunning momentum of Leonard Bernstein’s pulsating score, gloriously performed here by an orchestra conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. Despite the beautifully filmic sweep of the compositions, the camera sometimes stays at a remove: the tectonic choreography (by Justin Peck, reverently quoting Jerome Robbins’s original movement) of the “Dance at the Gym” takes place mostly in the background; part of “Tonight,” the reimagined balcony scene, is seen from a block away; and the final shot peeks at tragedy between the rungs of a fire escape, unwilling to follow Tony and Maria at the expense of missing the bigger picture. The frame begins to matter more than the actual people inside it.
Spielberg is also skittish around soliloquy. For one, Tony addresses “Something’s Coming” ebulliently to the drugstore owner, Valentina (Rita Moreno), who’s taken him in, and passersby react, at once confused and bemused, as he wanders the streets and sings “Maria.” But when West Side Story leans into faces and lets the actors work harder than Janusz Kamiński’s camera, the musical storytelling is often transcendent, as in the “Tonight Quintet,” a tensely building marvel that finds the Jets and Sharks preparing for battle, Tony and Maria ruminating on their budding love, and Anita (Ariana DeBose) lusting after Bernardo.
Elgort and Zegler are independently lovely, especially in song, but they’re most compelling with other scene partners. Tony is torn and tortured in his exchanges with the ferociously intense Riff (Mike Faist), who’s set on luring him back to gang life. And Maria is wickedly smart and vibrantly self-sufficient when battling with Bernardo and Anita. Maria, who pays her own rent and has academic aspirations, stands up to her brother’s domineering pomposity: “Tú no eres mi jefe,” she reminds him. But all that added character development doesn’t quite spark the passion between Tony and Maria across their sweet but antiseptic scenes together. Kushner perhaps provides them with too much baggage, too much outside world for their commitment-at-first-sight to “see only you” to feel entirely earned or believable.
Kushner’s most notable creation is Valentina, a part that was clearly conceived for Moreno, who won an Oscar for playing Anita in the 1961 film version of West Side Story. Valentina treats Tony like a son, and he celebrates her marriage with a white man, who’s now deceased. Her story serves as a strange semi-happy-ending prototype for Tony and Maria’s doomed love. The subplot of Valentina’s apparent assimilation into a white world pays dividends in a tense face-off between Valentina and Anita late in the film, but Tony’s early embrace of Valentina across racial lines dilutes the sense of awakening in Tony and Maria’s discovery of each other’s humanity. Moreno offers this West Side Story’s subtle, soft rendition of “Somewhere,” though, grounding a character whose purpose in the film might otherwise be nebulous.
DeBose, wry and heartbreaking as Anita, mesmerizes with her particularly impassioned performance of a “A Boy Like That” in duet with Zegler. But even in reimagining “America,” which DeBose dances explosively, Spielberg goes too big, staging a community-wide number that approaches Busby Berkeley scope and, in its euphoric energy, loses sight of the people the song portrays. Namely, Anita’s biting sarcasm is overshadowed by the enormous crowds.
West Side Story is at its best when it zooms in and settles down into character study; most potently, there’s a lightning strike of cinematographic reinvention in the scene after the “Tonight” number. The camera approaches a half-asleep Maria, her face at the foot of her bed, through a circle in her bed frame that surrounds her face like a religious portrait, as if anointing her for sainthood. Summoned by Anita, Maria jolts out of bed and readies herself, both gracefully and haplessly, throwing on clothes and rolling across her sheets so it looks like she hasn’t spent the better part of the night on the fire escape with Tony.
That scene is set to the music of Bernstein’s playful, curious “Scherzo,” an instrumental repurposed from the musical’s dream ballet that’s absent in this adaptation. But as Maria moves across her room, swiftly changing direction or confronting herself in the mirror, it’s as if her restless joy generates the music, as if Bernstein’s surprising shifts in time signature are of Maria’s own imagining. In such moments, when Spielberg pours all the universe into Zegler’s eyes, to paraphrase Sondheim’s perfect lyric, we see her and the world goes away.
Image/Sound
Buena Vista Home Entertainment’s 4K UHD is flawless for its rendering of West Side Story’s level of detail and color saturation. Texture is so fine that you can spot pores on actors’ faces and threading on clothes, as well as the subtle color variations within lens flares and other abrupt floods of light. The Dolby Atmos track gives ample space to the musical sequences, allowing each section of the orchestra clear space in the channels while ensuring that the lyrics take prominent position above the instruments.
Extras
All supplements are relegated to the accompanying Blu-ray disc, and they consist of a feature-length documentary on the history of West Side Story and isolated clips of the film’s musical scenes. The documentary is genuinely informative in detailing Steven Spielberg’s attachment to the project and the importance of the original stage musical and Robert Wise’s 1961 film adaptation, but the heart of the material is in the copious rehearsal and set footage that highlights the entire cast and crew who worked on the film.
Overall
Steven Spielberg’s take on West Side Story is his best film since Munich, and the 4K transfer is an early contender for the best-looking home video release of the year.
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