Over and over again in Steven Spielberg’s stunning adaptation of West Side Story, people face off against each other from the opposing sides of the screen. The Sharks and the Jets do it, as you would expect from theater’s dancing-est street gangs. Tony (Ansel Elgort) and Maria (Rachel Zegler) do it, first underneath the bleachers at the high school dance, then in the church where they declare their love. And the men and women of New York’s Upper West Side Puerto Rican immigrant community do it as they sing about “America.”
West Side Story is about the contradictions at the heart of the American experiment. Yes, we’re all created equal and, since we have the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we are free to love whom we want. But, as lyricist Stephen Sondheim put it, “Life is all right in America/If you’re all white in America.”
Sondheim, who passed away at age 91 just days before Spielberg’s film was released, was the newcomer in 1957 when he co-created West Side Story with composer Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins. It was Robbins’ idea to set Romeo and Juliet in what was then the poor neighborhood on Manhattan island and transform Shakespeare’s feuding “two households, both alike in dignity” into the Jets and Sharks, two groups of poor New Yorkers separated mostly by the timing of their ancestors’ immigration to America. Tony Kushner, who wrote the screenplay for Spielberg’s adaptation, makes this explicit when he has police Lieutenant Schrank (Corey Stoll) call out the Jets as the last white people who can’t make it in America.
Most of the onus of updating West Side Story for a 21st century America falls on Kushner as the screenwriter, and the Angels in America scribe succeeds beyond all expectations. This film is not a remake of the 1961 Best Picture Oscar winner; it’s an adaptation of the original play. The order of the songs reflect the play, which makes a lot more sense, plot-wise. The difference with the Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins version begins immediately. The camera pans across an urban wasteland of demolished buildings until it lands on a sign announcing the upcoming construction of Lincoln Center. The little square of turf the Sharks and Jets fight and die to control is doomed from the start. Later, in the Gimbels department store where Maria works as a cleaner (another Kushner addition), one of her co-workers expresses the hope that they will be able to stay in the neighborhood and live in a nice, new apartment. Another maid shoots her down — those apartments will be for rich people and we’ll have to move.
Spielberg has never made a musical before, although he has dabbled, such as the opening “Anything Goes” number in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I figured he would do a good job, but I didn’t think his first foray into the genre would be a perfect film. His staging and camera moves are on another level from everyone else working today. The dance at the school gym where Tony and Maria meet rivals the kinetic action sequences of Mad Max: Fury Road.
There’s not a sour note in the acting. Rachel Zegler is a first-time film actor who was one of 30,000 people who auditioned in an open casting call; her last role was as Maria in a community theater production of West Side Story in Englewood, New Jersey. She is absolutely radiant. Hamilton veteran Ariana DeBose nails the picture’s most difficult role as Anita, the Shark girl caught between love and anger. Just to add another layer of difficulty, DeBose has to play opposite Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for playing Anita in 1961. Moreno takes on the shopkeeper’s role as Valentina and delivers a showstopper in a show made of nothing but showstoppers. In Moreno’s hands, “Somewhere” is transformed into a paean for an American dream of equality that always seems just out of reach.
