How many bullets are left? Enough for you? And you? All of you? I can kill now because I hate now.
I’ve been a skeptic about this movie ever since it was first floated, which was years ago now, it seems. I kind of hate that internet culture essentially forces a person to form opinions about movies (and other things) before they even exist. I try to avoid these kinds of things when I can. But Spielberg doing his first musical, at a time in his career when his movies are often meticulous and stately at the expense of having any energy at all, and it’s a remake of one of the great film musicals of all time, West Side Story. Okay, there’s no way not to have an opinion about that. But, you know, the thing that is really the problem with having early opinions like that is the fact that many people feel the need to double down on their early opinions instead of being honest about the movie when it finally comes out. I think you’re allowed to have early opinions only if you’re willing to be honest about it when you’re wrong. That’s the kind of guy I am; I still openly admit that I thought Heath Ledger was a terrible choice for the Joker. Sometimes, you just own that you were wrong. This is one of those times. Because Spielberg has made a movie here that absolutely stands up next to the original and, in some ways, even surpasses it.
I’m not gonna do just a straight up and down comparison of the two; the movies are more complicated than that and I’m just gonna say from the jump here that I think they’re both classics and the way to watch West Side Story now is to watch them both. That’s the only option at this point. You have to see them both.
Let’s just first of all say that Spielberg’s assembled an amazing cast here, mostly newcomers to the big screen. Ariana DeBose, Mike Faist and David Alvarez are all absolute live-wires, popping off the screen with commanding and charismatic performances. DeBose and Alvarez are all fire and sparks; Faist finds a way to be dynamic in his despair with an edgy, angry performance. Rita Moreno is, of course, great in a supporting performance. And Rachel Zegler just really gives her Maria an emotional rawness that you can’t help but feel, whether she’s feeling grief, rage and joy. Ansel Elgort isn’t as dynamic as I might have liked; he’s a variable actor really who I’ve seen be both very good (Baby Driver) and very bland (The Fault In Our Stars). He’s neither here really, but he has some good moments and, look, the original West Side Story is a great movie and it has a far blander Tony with Richard Beymer. Elgort doesn’t exactly set the screen on fire, but he is better than that guy.
Tony Kushner’s script also does a really fantastic job just deepening the characters in some interesting ways, roughening the edges on them a bit. I especially appreciated the way the script worked on Tony’s character to make him feel like a character with more capacity for violence. The way the character is presented here means that it makes a lot more sense that Tony could lose control and commit that one act of tragic violence when he does. It’s a moment that has often felt a little too choreographed for me in some presentations of the story, where Tony, not a violent character, suddenly does something very violent because the story calls for it. But that scene here works because of the groundwork and it’s also one of Elgort’s best scenes in the film. It feels earned and real when Tony snaps. Faist’s performance in that scene, by the way, man, it’s absolutely amazing.
Some of those new scenes work absolutely perfectly with the recontextualization of some of the songs. One of my favorite elements of this movie was the way it handled the presence of the gun in the story; the scene where Riff buys the gun is one of the most heartbreaking scenes in the movie to me in the way that expresses his despair, but also, with the line about his dad, the generational cycle of despair. It’s literally the hopelessness of Riff that reminds the other characters there of his father and that’s just brutal. Then as we follow the gun, we get to see how, ultimately, just the presence of that one object is enough to expand in ripples of non-stop violence and hate. Taking Be Cool, which is a great number as it is in the original, and recontextualizing is Tony trying to get the gun away from Riff is absolutely brilliant and the way in which Riff and the other Jets play keepaway with the gun in that scene is indicative of the way that, even as Riff understands that the gun gives him power, he also doesn’t take it seriously enough. There’s still something in him that sees it as a game, the gun as a toy.
The movie recontextualizes a few of the songs like this and they almost all really work. I adored the way the movie took the semi-operatic Somewhere and turned into a quiet . . . prayer almost. Giving that song to Valentina makes it a song that’s less specific to Tony & Maria; it’s as if Valentina is praying it for everyone on the West Side. It speaks to the way in which they all really deserve better than the lives they’ve been given. Don’t get me wrong, the movie also delivers on those big spectacle numbers, like the High School Dance; taking America out into the streets in an eye-poppingly colorful and vibrant sequence is another great change in setting that really works.
But, end of the day, this is a tragedy, right? And I think that that story still just works. To some degree I can’t take Tony & Maria’s hyper-romantic love-story that seriously, but the movie does, after all, take place over a single weekend, more or less, and the tragedy here isn’t that Tony & Maria would have been together forever and grown old together in this beautiful, mythical love story if not for their situations; the tragedy is that everyone here is locked into this cycle of violence and despair that will always just destroy everything. Tony and Maria would have gotten past that first blush of infatuation if they’d had more time and maybe they wouldn’t have even had a relationship at all; but they deserved the chance to find that out organically, to experience the fullness of their story together, not to see a story of youthful infatuation turned into a heart-crushing tragedy. And as the movie’s final scene unfolds, it’s just the utter senseless of all the pain and suffering that really lands on you or at least really lands on me. It’s been a while since I’ve watched the original, so I had kind of forgotten just how bleak that ending really is. I was, end of the day, just once again deeply, deeply moved by that final scene and that’s really where everything else comes to a head; this movie, like the original, has a misstep here or there, but it’s impossible to care about those small quibbles when you get to that final scene and it just hits like a ton of bricks.
This is one of the darkest musicals ever, I think, and Spielberg’s version nails that despair and pain perfectly and that’s why this movie works and why this musical has endured over the decades. Sixty-five years on from the original play, the fact that it still feels so relevant, so of the moment, so urgent is part of that tragedy. West Side, East Side, all around the world, the story continues. 4 stars.
tl;dr – Spielberg’s remake succeeds by being a vibrant, powerful and urgent retelling of the classic; an amazing cast, a great script and creative song presentation make this one an instant classic. 4 stars.