West Side Story

Human life is finite. Time’s relent­less march brings us clos­er to the cas­ket every sin­gle day. As such, we need Steven Spiel­berg to be super selec­tive when it comes to the films he choses to make. With three quar­ters of a cen­tu­ry in the bank, and a work­horse eth­ic that has result­ed in rough­ly a film every oth­er year, we’re eking ever clos­er to the end zone of one of cinema’s most illus­tri­ous careers. Sor­ry to be maudlin, but it’s a fact.

“Every­one has their rea­sons,” as Jean Renoir famous­ly mused, and the sub­lime mys­ter­ies of human inscrutabil­i­ty come into play when pon­der­ing the ques­tion: why on earth did Spiel­berg chose to make an every­thing-and-the-kitchen-sink ren­di­tion of West Side Sto­ry, the jazz musi­cal con­ceived by Jerome Rob­bins and with music and lyrics care of Leonard Bern­stein and Stephen Sond­heim? There was mut­ed sur­prise when it was announced, and now hav­ing seen the film, a sense of per­plexed irri­ta­tion remains.

Cur­tain up. The cam­era presents a mid-cen­tu­ry New York sky­line in tran­si­tion, the sky­scrap­ers flank­ing a work­site in which grub­by brick ten­e­ments are being wreck­ing-balled to make way for ritzy apart­ments and Lin­coln Cen­tre – an epi­cen­tre of Amer­i­can visu­al cul­ture, here used as short­hand for chat­ter­ing class gen­tri­fi­ca­tion. Set to the famil­iar rhythm of click­ing fin­gers, we meet the Jets, led by Mike Faist’s Riff, as they exe­cute a plan to ruin a mur­al on a Puer­to Rican play­ground, con­test­ed ter­ri­to­ry of the Sharks, led by David Alvarez’ kiss-curled pugilist, Bernardo.

The first thing you notice is that this doesn’t look like a musi­cal in the clas­si­cal sense of the term. The colours are strange­ly mut­ed, cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Janusz Kamin­s­ki opt­ing for pas­tel ochres and washed-out browns rather than the glow­ing reds of Tech­ni­col­or dreams. The edges in the film are all soft­ened – aes­thet­i­cal­ly and emo­tion­al­ly. The cam­era, too, man­i­cal­ly dances and swish­es around the actors, the sharp cuts slic­ing through the action in an overzeal­ous attempt to stake the film’s claim as a piece of bells ​‘n’ whis­tles cin­e­ma rather than filmed the­atre. Ini­tial­ly the raz­zle daz­zle does enough to hold the inter­est, but after a while it comes across as emp­ty show­man­ship, tech­nique at the expense of focus.

Enter stage left, Rachel Zegler’s wide-eyed Maria, the depart­ment store clean­er with dreams of roman­tic escape. And then, from stage right, we have Ansel Elgort’s Tony, the Polack goon with heart-melt­ing capa­bil­i­ties and a dark past. In the his­to­ry of dra­mat­ic art, their cos­mi­cal­ly-aligned love tran­scends the banal every­day to achieve some­thing close to the mag­i­cal sub­lime, and this par­tic­u­lar sto­ry only works if that idea is con­veyed believ­ably and with staunch conviction.

Alas, here the chem­istry between the two leads is neg­li­gi­ble – even the mas­sive height dif­fer­ence empha­sis­es an awk­ward­ness that real­ly shouldn’t have been entered into the equa­tion. Zegler is decent – clear­ly on the lev­el with the fairy­tale aspects of the mate­r­i­al. Yet there’s bare­ly a moment where Elgo­rt doesn’t feel as if he’s wad­ed too far into the deep end, his small, dark eyes adding an air of unnec­es­sary mys­tery to a char­ac­ter whose heart should lit­er­al­ly be there on his sleeve. The earnest sim­plic­i­ty of Tony has been tak­en for grant­ed, and this feels like a major mis­cast when it comes to mak­ing sure the emo­tion­al foun­da­tions of this tow­er­ing sto­ry are there, set deep in the ground.

The songs are all deliv­ered with ample con­vic­tion and Rita Moreno steals the show as wid­owed Puer­to Rican shop-own­er who has tak­en errant Tony under her wing (her ren­di­tion of ​‘Some­where’ is the film’s high­point.) Yet it’s a strange thing to say about one of the world’s fore­most forg­ers of cin­e­mat­ic imagery and svel­te­ly assured sto­ry­telling, but on this evi­dence, Spiel­berg has no feel for musi­cals. He appears resis­tant to just show­ing the actors per­form­ing – plac­ing bod­ies in the frame and paint­ing with peo­ple. There’s a cloy­ing need to make him­self, the direc­tor, feel at every moment. The indi­vid­ual per­for­mances are all fine, but there’s no dynamism and connectivity.

And yet the brash, over­ly pro­nounced deliv­ery of the dia­logue – as if it’s being shout­ed for those in the cheap seats – dents the social real­ist air that Spiel­berg is attempt­ing to cul­ti­vate through his ultra-detailed vin­tage pro­duc­tion design and ungain­ly fore­ground­ing of the story’s polit­i­cal sub­texts. At one minute it feels like a music video, the next it’s as if the direc­tor is des­per­ate to hold the atten­tion of a fid­gety audi­ence through over­ly chore­o­graphed set-pieces for num­bers which – as we saw in Robert Wise’s supe­ri­or 1961 film – can sim­ply soar on the wings of the songs and the performances.

It’s a rare, back­wards look­ing mis­fire for this direc­tor who has always been at the van­guard of cin­e­mat­ic inno­va­tion. The care and atten­tion that has gone into the mak­ing of this film is unde­ni­able, though at times it feels mis­placed and oth­ers over­wrought. The sto­ry is so baked into the col­lec­tive con­scious­ness that this does feel like we’re going through the motions by the final act. And as the final cred­its roll, the ​“why” of Spielberg’s West Side Sto­ry is as unclear as it was when news of its con­cep­tion first hit the trades.