West Side Story (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Karen Backstein

Produced by Tony Kushner, Daniel Lupi, Rita Moreno, Adam Somner, and Steven Spielberg; directed by Steven Spielberg; screenplay by Tony Kushner based on the stage play by Arthur Laurents; cinematography by Janusz Kaminski; edited by Sarah Broshar and Michael Kahn, production design by Adam Stockhausen; music by Leonard Bernstein; starring Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler, Ariana DeBose, David Alvarez, Rita Moreno, Brian d’Arcy James, and Corey Stoll. A Twentieth Century Studios release.

The original West Side Story, released in 1961, casts a long shadow: not only did it have an enormous success on Broadway prior to becoming a movie, but the film won ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor and Actress. Thanks to its noted creators, much hoopla surrounded its production and release, and it also marked a major turning point in the Hollywood musical with its mix of gritty live locations, balletic technique, and symphonic music, resulting in what creator/co-director/choreographer Jerome Robbins accurately called a “choreo-opera.” For that version of West Side Story, it wasn’t a question of when and how characters broke into song and dance, but when they didn’t. Spoken language in the original served mostly as an introduction to song, which then seamlessly morphed into dance. Singing, not plain talk, served as the major mode of speech.

Ever since the Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins West Side Story came out, two schools of interpretation have fought over the text: one argues for the formal, aesthetic, artistic value of the work, the quality of its score and brilliance of the choreography. Other voices, especially powerful in the Puerto Rican community, focus on issues of representation—especially the equation of Latinos with gang violence and juvenile delinquency. Even Rita Moreno, who has always championed her award-winning role of Anita and considers it a landmark in her career, criticized the dark makeup used for every one of the Sharks and demanded a change to some of the lyrics in “America.” And the fact that both Bernardo and Maria, as well as virtually all the Sharks, were not played by Latinx actors, galled.            

Now, for his first musical film, Steven Spielberg, with the help of writer Tony Kushner and choreographer Justin Peck, and with the blessing of the late lyricist Stephen Sondheim, has revisited this iconic work. An audacious act in many ways given West Side Story’s indelible association with Robbins, this revisionist take attempts to redress some of the political and social criticisms that plagued the original. Certainly, in choosing Peck, a former dancer with the New York City Ballet and one of today’s most sought-after choreographers, Spielberg found someone both with ballet and Broadway experience, whose profound and intimate knowledge of Robbins’s ballets allow him to pay homage to the master while remaining true to himself. But notably, Peck did not hold the reins on this film as Robbins did. 

Spielberg’s reconception works beautifully in many ways, and fails in others, but on the whole is surprisingly successful at taking on this warhorse. In this updated interpretation, numbers don’t flow as smoothly from one to another as they formerly did. Straight dramatic scenes, even including the most mundane details of home life, now play a more prominent role in providing background information and creating texture. While this strategy does more effectively humanize the Latinx protagonists—as before, the Jets appear to have no family or stability—they also segment the musical numbers, making them discrete entities. It’s a more traditional approach to the genre than what Robbins dreamed up.  

Robbins’s traditional liberal attitude saw all the gang members as misunderstood youth, desperate for respect and a somewhere that belonged to them. But the Jets never had to represent every young white man, because white men appeared in virtually every film, allowing for a multiplicity of images. The Sharks, and the Puerto Ricans they stood in for, had no such luxury. There was no escaping the fact that while the Jets were able to be wholly individual, the Sharks also had to symbolize an already demonized ethnic group. Never mind that it is the Jets who carry out the most reprehensible act in the film, the attempted rape of Anita—a scene that Spielberg makes far more harrowing than the original.  

Spielberg and Kushner try to repair past sins by providing more cultural and psychological context for all the characters and their situation, and by casting Latinos (though not necessarily Puerto Ricans, a fact that has not actually been much discussed) as the Sharks. The dark makeup has disappeared; Anita is multiracial, and the script weaves liberal amounts of untranslated Spanish throughout. Community, family, and the American dream here belong firmly with the Puerto Ricans. Anita no longer is just a seamstress, but a seamstress with a plan to open her own shop. And no matter how much Bernardo proselytizes about the prejudice he faces and the lack of equality he’s found in the United States, he’s also able to taunt the Jets by pointing out that he and his gang actually have jobs (a poster of him as a boxer prominently hangs in his apartment), while they don’t. The Jets are, as police make clear, the dregs that remain after the other immigrants and outsiders have successfully moved up and out to the suburbs. The list of the various groups who came and went—the Jews, the Irish, the Italians—points to an ongoing cycle of outsiders assimilating and of resentment by those who, for one reason or another, fail to make it. Even Tony, the seemingly sweet romantic hero of the story, now has a past that includes jail time and the near murder of a rival gang member with his bare fists. Not only does Kushner’s script thus change the dynamic between the Jets and Sharks, it also brings the story into the present, into a Trumpified America where white male rage at the Other burns hot. As Riff says to Tony, “everything is being taken over by people I don’t like.” For the Jets, the streets are all they have and ever will, and they’re powerless to control that.

The film directly addresses the status of the neighborhood where the battle between the Jets and Sharks unfolds—the former San Juan Hill that got demolished so that Lincoln Center could rise from its ashes. In place of the original’s breathtaking opening, with aerial views spanning the city that then plunge down to the snapping fingers of the Jets in the playground, the first overhead images we now see show only rubble in what could be a war zone. Moving in close, the camera rises from the ground to reveal a sign that says, “Slum Clearance” and displays a picture of the future arts complex as it would look completed. Machines litter the ground and demolish the landscape. Rather than using natural color, these shots have a sepia tone, suggesting a time already gone. Soon, this new version states, implicitly in what we see and explicitly through the script, neither the Jets nor the Sharks will control those streets because the wealthy will rule them; this true-to-the-past touch adds a desperate poignancy to the struggle that will cost the protagonists dearly but win them nothing.

At the same time as he shows the construction and debris, Spielberg presents more of the neighborhood that does still survive, filling it up with bystanders, shoppers, walkers, people going about their business. We see stores and diners, many with signs in Spanish—one of which the Jets pull down, infuriating the owner. The Jets and the Sharks are no longer the only beings in this world as they once were. The space is historicized, the world opened up as everyday living unfolds all around them. In exchange for this historicization, however, a loss occurs: that of the screen as a dance space, one dominated by movement, music, and primary colors that signal allegiances. If we’re often accustomed to thinking about location shooting and stage sets as two separate things, Robbins demolished that distinction, at least for the original’s opening scenes. Though the prologue was shot in the city, it served as a set, closed and all-encompassing, mostly emptied of normal activity and given highly stylized and signifying backgrounds and designs. The dancers’ movement dominated, and even when a storefront might appear, it served only as a dance backdrop. But Spielberg’s opening is less bravura, constraining the choreography. In the original, the gang members prowled the streets hungrily, devouring the space they danced across and believed they owned. Here the dynamics seem tamped down, the explosiveness through various spaces defused. When the Jets finally emerge, they pop out in close-up from behind a door amidst the junk, tossing cans of paint, eventually used to deface a mural of a Puerto Rican flag, from one to the other in a makeshift assembly line. While Peck pays homage to Robbins’s belief in having choreography develop naturally from everyday gestures and movement—the way first one Jet and then the other breaks from the group and goes into a slight spin or a brief balance slightly resembles the original—the whole never quite turns into a ballet. The opening sequence does set up the struggle with the Puerto Ricans but lacks the original’s dance cross-cutting that shows first one gang and then the other emerging triumphant as they ambush each other.  

Similarly, although “America” now takes place outdoors in the daytime, on the avenues rather than on the seemingly smaller rooftop, ironically it feels more contained and constrained. The architecture on both sides of the street hems the dancers in, the choreography taking place in what resembles a soundstage from an old MGM musical. At the same time, the privacy of the number in the original—the Sharks in their own building, enjoying a relaxing moment alone away from their daily struggles, and playfully arguing among themselves—here becomes a public performance. Anita begins the song at the end of a morning argument with Bernardo as she reels in the laundry hanging on the outside clothes lines; other women pop their heads out of the windows to chime in, making it a neighborhood conversation rather than just a debate between male and female Sharks. As Anita departs the building, still singing, various Shark ladies join her, followed by the men, who physically and verbally lag a step behind the dominant women. As Anita and her crew confidently strut across the neighborhood, their swaggering, self-assured movement morphs into full-fledged dance that draws everyone in: traffic comes to a halt, crowds gather to watch, a trapped cab waits as its clearly upper-class passenger steps out to gaze at the goings-on. Children eventually jump in, adding to the feel of a parade—recalling the way Gene Kelly numbers like “I Like Myself” often established a built-in audience within the frame. By the time “America” concludes and the camera pulls away, onlookers have packed the street.  

Among their alterations, Spielberg (with Kushner) has reverted “Cool” to its original order in the play, before the rumble, giving it to Tony and Riff, while moving “Office Krupke” into the police station where the cops struggle to find out where the fight will take place. The former number, in Robbins’s version, constituted one of the most glorious pieces of filmed choreography ever devised: set in a huge garage in the emotional aftermath of Riff’s death, it incorporated bright, suddenly switched-on car headlights and quick, stabbing edits to punctuate sharp, popping movements by a succession of small, carefully positioned groups. When the entire gang rushed forward in unison, bodies jazzy and low to the ground, the camera led the way, rushing ahead of the pack. Peck rightly doesn’t try to imitate the inimitable. Here, in a totally different conception of meaning and movement, the song turns personal as Tony grabs the gun Riff obtained for the rumble and practically taunts him with the weapon as he tries to “cool” Riff down. Set on a dock, tightly bordered on one side by the water and the other by the watching Jets, the dance emerges from a constant approach-and-withdraw by wary antagonists jostling for control as they circle, spin, jump, and climb into and out of the other’s way. Once Riff does wrest the gun from Tony, it’s tossed from Jet to Jet until, tension still thick in the air, they stalk off. In another smart shift, the Jets sing “Officer Krupke” while shut in a room in the police station, leaping on the benches and desks, tossing official papers around until they blanket the floor, and leaving Krupke to survey the wreckage. As with much of the film, an onlooker is built into the scene: a prostitute who locks herself into the holding cage in the room, as if she needs to protect herself from these hooligans.

“I Feel Pretty,” one of Sondheim’s least favorite of his own songs, gets a particularly masterful treatment here. It moves out of the dress shop and into the neon-lit Gimbel’s, where Maria and her friends work as night cleaners. All wearing the same pink uniform, they make a coordinated corps as they inhabit the department store’s “dressed spaces” that showcase outfits for vacation and other occasions, all meant for those wealthier than any of these women. Their own alienation from these consumer goods already brings an edge to the “workspace as playground” motif so typical of the classical musical, but it’s made even more bittersweet by the fact that the number now occurs after the rumble, with Maria (though not the audience) still unaware of Bernardo’s death.

Spielberg discovered new young talents who handle their parts superbly, and with strong dancing and singing skills, from the leads right down to the assorted gang members, many drawn from ballet companies. With the exception of Ansel Elgort (Tony) and former reality TV star Maddie Ziegler (Velma, Riff’s girlfriend), these unknown performers—Rachel Zegler (Maria), David Alvarez (Bernardo), Mike Faist (Riff), and especially Ariana DeBose as a charismatic Anita—don’t bring the baggage of former roles to the film. But one actor, in a transformed and expanded role, holds much of the movie’s weight on her shoulders: Rita Moreno, the award-winning Anita in the 1961 film and one of the only actual Puerto Ricans cast back then. As Valentina, ostensibly the widow of Doc, the original owner of the soda/candy shop where the Jets gathered, she serves as Tony’s guide and moral compass and an exemplar of the mixed marriage to which he and Maria aspire. For the knowledgeable viewer, Moreno also bridges the new and old versions of West Side Story, providing a welcome continuity between the two. Spielberg also hands over to her a song that once belonged to the young lovers, and her world-weariness infuses it with poignancy. The basement of her shop, where Tony lives and works, is one of two places—the other being the Cloisters, where Tony and Maria enact their “wedding” and sing “One Hand, One Heart”— infused with gentle streaks and rays of light that suggest the heavens shining in on the occupants.

Because big-budget musicals are a rarity now, every new entry in the genre seems to become a test case for its viability, and whether and how it can be invigorated. West Side Story’s pedigree, and Spielberg’s own status, have magnified the level of scrutiny and heightened the debate on whether this particular story ever should have been remade, even with a revised political agenda and the input of scholarly advisors. Latinx activists would have preferred resources go to new filmmakers and films that explore and represent the Puerto Rican experience from their own point of view. It is unlikely, despite the many critical accolades for Spielberg’s accomplishment, that the debate about art, politics, and representation in West Side Story will fade away anytime soon.

Karen Backstein received her PhD from New York University, has taught in a number of New York-area colleges, and published articles on dance and film, Brazilian cinema, and cult TV.

Copyright © 2022 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 2