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Review
West Side Story, review: Spielberg’s magnificent remake is his finest film in 20 years
The director's first musical feels as definitive as the previous screen adaptation and a timely testament to the genius of Stephen Sondheim
Among the handful of New Hollywood legends still working today, Steven Spielberg may be the hardest to second guess. With Martin Scorsese, or David Lynch, or Paul Schrader, or Robert Zemeckis, you know where you stand: they’re still flitting round the same flames that fascinated them when they appeared on the scene in the 1970s, changed how Hollywood cinema could look and behave, and spellbound the world in the process.
But Spielberg is different. In the two decades since his mid-career masterpiece AI Artificial Intelligence, he has moved freely between subjects, genres and tones with what could be dismissed as a middle-aged potterer’s passing fancy if the results hadn’t so often been astonishingly well-achieved. Look from War Horse to War of the Worlds, or from Lincoln to Bridge of Spies, and it’s impossible to say which one offers the purest, keenest expression of the Spielbergian style. All you can really do is pick a favourite and be glad you were around to see it made.
So let me pick mine. West Side Story is, I believe, Spielberg’s finest film in 20 years, and a new milestone in the career of one of our greatest living directors. A little less than a month before his 75th birthday, he has delivered a relentlessly dazzling, swoonily beautiful reworking of the 1957 Manhattan-set musical by Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, which feels just as definitive and indestructible as the previous screen adaptation, directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins.
It opens in British cinemas next Friday, two weeks after Sondheim’s death: aside from everything else, it could hardly be a more timely or conclusive reminder of his genius.
Rather than follow in its 1961 forerunner’s gravity-defying steps, Spielberg and his screenwriter Tony Kushner have stripped down its story of feuding gangs and yearning lovers to its parts, then rebuilt it with new colour and dynamics drawn from New York social history and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (the latter of which inspired West Side Story to begin with). The result is miraculous: a film which fuses the colour and euphoria of a Golden Age movie musical with the teeming, dirty-fingernailed grandeur of a classic American immigrant epic.
It opens in ruins. The setting is San Juan Hill on Manhattan’s Upper West Side; a cluster of slums being razed to make way for modern apartment blocks in the mid-1950s. Spielberg’s camera glides over the rubble and past jagged tenement ruins: “I lived here,” a scrawl of graffiti feebly insists. It doesn’t look like much – but it’s home to the Jets, a gaggle of Caucasian hoodlums, as well as the city’s booming Puerto Rican population, whose own gang, the Sharks, are trying to chomp out their own portion of this already withering turf.
Spielberg’s thrilling staging of the opening scuffle, as these two troupes hare after each other down alleyways and over hummocks of rubble, shows a filmmaker in total command of his craft. The intent to part ways with Wise and Robbins’ film is immediately obvious in Justin Peck’s sensational choreography, which swaps the springy nimbleness of Robbins’ balletic routines for an earthier, more sensual yet still mesmerisingly graceful style: think Gene Kelly with a splash of Magic Mike.
Every element of the film is up on the balls of its feet. Spielberg has made the bold decision not to subtitle any of the Spanish phrases that pepper the script, which for non-Hispanophones may prove initially disorienting. But in doing so, the film refuses to frame the Puerto Ricans as the “foreign side”: instead, they’re just another ingredient in the great cosmopolitan hotpot.
Kushner’s dialogue, meanwhile, has an unobtrusive elegance that lends each conversation an old-fashioned fluency and swish. The lines aren’t individually showy, but rather conspire to pull the viewer effortlessly along with subtle rhythmic parries and verbal do-si-dos.
“I can’t talk my guys out of making trouble,” the Jets’ leading heartthrob Tony (Ansel Elgort) cautions in one scene, before adding: “trouble is what they’re made of.” This isn’t writing that pops, but writing that sticks.
Elgort, the star of the 2017 action thriller Baby Driver, has cannily been cast at least in part for his Brando-esque smoulder and pout. But he’s also one of those actors who’s just a pleasure to watch in motion: when the Polish-descended Tony climbs a fire escape to flirt with Maria (Rachel Zegler), the sister of Sharks honcho Bernardo (David Alvarez), the recklessness of their interracial romance becomes a literal acrobatic feat. And when the pair meet and kiss at a dance earlier that evening, cinematographer Janusz Kamiński makes the coloured lights around them scatter like slow-motion fireworks.
This is perfect Spielberg: spectacle and sentiment aren’t vying powers here, but complementary forces, each propelling the other to bewitching new heights. In a shot of Tony gazing up at Maria’s window, the puddle he’s standing in catches the reflections of nearby neon signs and is transformed into a Technicolor whirlpool. (West Side Story regularly reminds you that yes, it is still possible to light actors like this.)
And when the Puerto Rican seamstress Anita (Ariana DeBose) launches into her signature number America – which, by the by, is the most gorgeous sequence to be found in the cinema this year – her brazen joie de vivre catches on everyone around her until the entire neighbourhood is ablaze.
The 30-year-old DeBose holds the screen magnetically whenever she’s on it: she gives an instant star-is-born performance even surrounded by a wildly impressive cast, many of whose younger members have been plucked from the musical theatre circuit. The 20-year-old Zegler, in the dewy-eyed role made famous by Natalie Wood, is another revelation – as is the 29-year-old Mike Faist, who’s a twitchy, wiry delight as Riff, Tony’s ally and the Mercutio of the piece.
Foremost among the older players is Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for her performance as Anita in the 1961 film, and returns in the brand new role of Valentina, the widowed proprietress of Doc’s Drugstore, and a semi-analogue for Romeo and Juliet’s Nurse. She’s terrific as the film’s moral centre, and also gets to perform Somewhere – a sparkle-eyed Tony-Maria duet in the 1961 adaptation, recast as a tear-stained ode to immigrant naïveté and hope.
There’s no need for Spielberg and Kushner to tease out topicality here. Aspects of West Side Story feel as pertinent today as they must have done on its 1957 Broadway debut. But relevance is easy: timelessness is the real artistic feat. And Spielberg has magnificently pulled it off.
Cert tbc; 156 min. In cinemas from December 10