WEST SIDE STORY ***
Steven Spielberg2021
IDEA: In the midst of a rivalry between white and Puerto Rican gangs in 1957 New York City, a forbidden romance blossoms between star-crossed lovers Tony and Maria.
BLURB: Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story introduces itself like a war film. In place of the chicly modernist aerial city views of the 1961 adaptation, the camera glides close to the rubble-strewn earth, surveying the ruins of a neighborhood that’s become a battleground in more ways than one. Of course, West Side Story has always been something of a war story, but this version underlines and expands on that idiom by grounding its drama more viscerally in the forces of systemic depredation and ethnic tribalism. Through the grimy decay of Stockhausen and DeAngelo’s sets, the overexposed gleam of Kaminski’s lensing, and the sweaty rough-and-tumble physicality of its actors, this West Side Story conjures a verisimilitude of dread within its artifice that is striking. At the same time, Spielberg and Kushner balance this new realism with grandly classical Old Hollywood spectacle and a fundamental impulse to remain loyal to the original text – its pleasures as well as many of its deficiencies. While it’s hard to watch the film without having some lingering skepticism about the point of its existence, it’s also impossible to fault the sheer brio and technical prowess of Spielberg’s production on a moment-to-moment basis. The outsize emotions of the material are ideally matched to the director’s own lushly melodramatic sensibilities, and he even manages to find some savvy ways to add new dimensions to canonical sequences. No creative decision lands more poignantly than the change made to the voice of“Somewhere,” which becomes here a punctum to the fiction, a metatextual threnody connecting past and present with sobering clarity.
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