West Side Story review: Steven Spielberg puts a radical spin on a classic

The 1961 film version is available for fans who want to see the original stage musical. West Side Story, the initial trailers for Steven Spielberg’s 2021 update weren’t necessarily inviting. The first images made it obvious that Spielberg was drawing heavily on the ’61 version, with very similar staging, choreography, costuming (from designs to cuts to colors), and even specific shots and sequences. It was unclear why the world required a different version, or if Spielberg intended to be merely a copycat. Remaking a classic is a dicey bet for anyone, even a filmmaker of Spielberg’s stature, because every remake needs a reason to exist.

With a great deal of passion and confidence, the film offers an answer. Spielberg takes a great deal of inspiration from original director Jerome Robbins, and he holds to a lot of the specifics that made the ’61 version so indelible. He’s clearly a fan of the original movie, but that doesn’t prevent him from making this story his own, in a variety of ambitious and compelling ways.

[Ed. note: This review notes some of the notable changes to West Side Story that some may consider spoilers.]

The setting of 2021’s West Side Story is the same as it’s always been: 1950s New York City, in a run-down working-class neighborhood valued only by the residents who take pride in walking tall on their own turf. The story is the same: In an updated retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and JulietTense situations arise when two rival street gangs battle for the same territory. Then, it happens that two youths with connections to both gangs get together and fall in love. The songs are the same: Leonard Bernstein’s jagged, urgent, catchy music and Stephen Sondheim’s tricky lyrics combine to express the story’s big emotions in ways designed to leave audiences humming along after the credits roll.

The Walt Disney Company. Photo

But while Spielberg’s version respects the past, Tony Kushner’s evolution of Arthur Laurents’ stage play also takes every opportunity to add nuance. Kushner adds an irony: As the gangs battle over who most owns the neighborhood, the city’s planning commission is planning to flatten the whole area for an urban-renewal project. It’s a heavy-handed thought, matched by setpieces where the neighborhood is increasingly reduced to piles of rubble around the people who are fighting over it. But there’s certainly a message there about the petty futility of the racial and class battles the residents are fighting, given the bigger picture around them.

Again, it begins with the Jets. A gang made up of mostly white working-class boys, they rule nine blocks of a rough and run-down area. Riff, the Jets founder, is Mike Faist (Ansel Elgort). He has faced many challenges in the past but now the Sharks (a Puerto Rican group trying to establish a life in a new nation) are their rivals. From Riff’s perspective, the Sharks are pushy, unwanted invaders who provoke fights by defying the natives’ well-established territorial claim. To the Sharks’ leader, Bernardo (David Alvarez), Riff and his boys are bigots and bullies, representative of the inherent racism and oppression underlying the so-called land of opportunity. When Tony and Bernardo’s sister Maria (Rachel Zegler) encounter each other at a local dance, they fall for each other in the instantaneous way of movie musicals and Romeo and Juliet Stories and the appalled community that surrounds them, are already primed to violence.

While many of Spielberg’s setpieces evoke Robbins’ choices from 1961, Spielberg takes some particularly bold steps, utterly re-imagining the classic numbers to give them new urgency and dynamism. The script’s minor changes make the story feel more alive, which gives the characters new depth.

This new emphasis is mainly on the Puerto Rican characters. Original play showed more compassion and admiration for the immigrants fresh off the boat than culturally acceptable in the time period where it was written. Spielberg and Kushner’s version underlines those sympathies even further. The filmmakers made a crucial update in the casting, replacing the 1961 version’s Sharks — mostly white and non-Latinx actors in brownface — with an all-Latinx cast. And they pack significant scenes with unsubtitled Spanish dialogue — not clumsy Spanglish or the odd mid-sentence language-swapping that’s become common in TV shows and games trying to establish a setting and culture without alienating English speakers. In fact, they are actually quite funny. West Side StoryFeels like it was designed for bilingual viewers.

The Walt Disney Company. Photo

They also change the backstories of characters. Bernardo is now a promising boxer. His vivacious girlfriend Anita (Ariana DeBose) has significant career ambitions, while Maria has built a history in America that far outstrips her brother’s. Even Bernardo’s buddy Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera) is more of a character in this retelling — not just the harmless nerd Bernardo keeps pushing at Maria, but Bernardo’s best friend, who he’s trying to protect from any interaction with the gangs. The changes are superficial, and they don’t much shift the story. Some of them just raise questions — shouldn’t Bernardo be in training, instead of running around the streets, fighting with local kids?

Every little detail makes the story unique and focuses on individuals as well as the memorable dance moves they do. Riff and the Jets don’t get as much of a reboot, but romantic lead Tony does. In this version of the story, he’s freshly back from a prison stint after nearly killing another kid in a fight. Riff attempts to get him into gang-life, but his horror at the violence he has committed makes him even more afraid. Here, Tony was raised by a Puerto Rican woman, Valentina (Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for playing Anita in the ’61 version) after he lost his parents. Being raised with one foot on each side of the growing racial divide around him makes his attraction to Maria and his inability to understand Bernardo’s hatred of him even more understandable.

So much of Spielberg’s version is just the Robbins version, plus those added grace notes in the script. A few of the classic songs are boldly re-envisioned; “Cool,” “One Hand, One Heart,” and “Gee, Officer Krupke” have different tones and settings that shift their meanings. Though in the movie’s biggest miscalculation, Spielberg takes the plaintive “I wish” song “Somewhere” away from Tony and Maria, and gives it to Valentina. The scene is a tearjerker that thoroughly respects Moreno’s meaningful history with the show and with a Hollywood that often couldn’t find a place for her talents. But the song feels thin as a solo number, and there’s a significant shift in meaning between two young people imagining a world where their doomed new love might flourish, and an 89-year-old woman imagining a reunion with her dead husband. Worse, moving the song away from Maria and Tony robs the play of its poignant reprise, blunting the film’s ultimate emotional impact at a key moment.

Apart from that song, though, Moreno’s performance is warm and welcome, and it’s a strong addition to a cast that mostly brings all the necessary zing to this emphatic musical material. Mike Faist (at 29 years old, Faist can easily be mistaken for an aging, wild and precocious gang member) is the major star. Zegler, DeBose, and Alvarez are both riveting actors.

Photograph by 20th Century Studios

But the real star of the show is Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s camera, which goes places Robbins never could back in 1961. The swirling skirts and Latin-infused choreography of the “America” performance or the neighborhood dance-off come out of the ’60s version, but in this rendition, the camera flies over the action, dives between the dancers’ legs, and swoops in close to capture their faces. When Riff and Tony face off over a weapon on a disintegrating platform in “Cool,” the camera leaps back and forth between them like an extra combatant in the fray. Kaminski moves into the center of the action, in areas where Robbins was standing back. It’s breathtaking, and even a little threatening, to be so immersed in such fast-paced movement and color.

It could be the same for the rest of Spielberg’s film. He does everything he can to tell a big, lively story, but he also pays attention to all the details that make up our world. He’s managed a remake that deviates from the original without losing its heart or its appeal, and that justifies its existence artistically without becoming unrecognizable. It’s a hell of an achievement, and the rare case where a remake feels like an act of fervent fandom.

West Side StoryThis film is currently in cinemas.