Steven Spielberg’s West Side Sto­ry reveals daz­zling new images

A long way away, Decem­ber. While every­thing may seem con­sumed by chaos and uncer­tain­ty and insti­tu­tion­al incom­pe­tence right now, it’s not so dif­fi­cult to imag­ine things hav­ing set­tled back into a rel­a­tive nor­mal­cy by the hol­i­day sea­son. Or at least that’s what Steven Spiel­berg​‘s hop­ing.

A glossy new cov­er pack­age at Van­i­ty Fair looks ahead to the release of his West Side Sto­ry remake on 18 Decem­ber, which has not been scut­tled even as stu­dios put their fea­ture slates on ice until this whole glob­al pan­dem­ic hul­la­baloo blows over. The pre­view teas­es a more col­or­ful aes­thet­ic than the aggres­sive­ly beige pro­mo­tion­al pho­to released last year, and the accom­pa­ny­ing arti­cle promis­es a revi­sion­ist take to match the new look.

Spiel­berg has laced his piece of mid­cen­tu­ry New York with glow­ing hues, from the neon signs of Doc’s cor­ner store — a neu­tral ground of con­di­tion­al cease­fire between war­ring gangs The Sharks and The Jets — to the gym­na­si­um lights of the school dance where vio­lence threat­ens to break out. The arti­cle includes Spielberg’s repro­duc­tions of the famed shot in which Tony (Ansel Elgo­rt) and Maria (Rachel Zegler) lock eyes with one anoth­er across the crowd­ed room and instant­ly lose them­selves in romance.

Anoth­er sig­nif­i­cant part of the arti­cle per­tains to Rita Moreno, who pre­vi­ous­ly net­ted her­self an Oscar for por­tray­ing Ani­ta, girl­friend to Sharks leader Bernar­do in the 1961 orig­i­nal. She appears in the new film as the wid­ow to the now-absent Doc, her pres­ence both a nod to the pre­ced­ing film as well as the increased Puer­to Rican rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the cast. She was one of very few actu­al Lati­no actors in a pro­duc­tion that passed Natal­ie Wood off as its Maria, a ​“wrong” that Spiel­berg pur­ports to have ​“right­ed.”

The theme of racial strife, already fore­ground­ed in the text, will take an even more promi­nent place­ment in Spielberg’s inter­pre­ta­tion (and pre­sum­ably in the script, whipped up by the filmmaker’s for­mer Lin­coln col­lab­o­ra­tor Tony Kush­n­er). The song Amer­i­ca has only grown more ter­ri­bly res­o­nant, with its wit­ty lam­poon­ing of the dream of upward mobil­i­ty. ​“Every­thing free in Amer­i­ca, for a small fee in Amer­i­ca” – same as it ever was.