Steven Spielberg’s stirring reimagining of the 1957 Broadway hit and 1961 screen adaptation “West Side Story” is my favorite — and arguably the best — film of 2021.
In 1957, choreographer Jerome Robbins, composer Leonard Bernstein, lyricist Stephen Sondheim, and book writer Arthur Laurents brilliantly reinterpreted William Shakespeare’s 1597 “Romeo and Juliet.” They reset the tragic tale of Verona’s star-crossed lovers and their feuding families to modern-day Manhattan, morphing the battling Montagues and Capulets into warring gangs: the New York-born Jets versus the Puerto Rico-born Sharks. The Verona balcony where Romeo wooed Juliet was updated, taking place on Maria’s fire escape.
The musical scored six Tony Award nominations, winning two, while Robert Wise’s screen adaptation earned 10 Oscars, including for Best Picture and, for the first time ever, a Hispanic actor won in the Best Supporting Actress Oscar category.
Ninety-year-old Rita Moreno, who won that coveted golden statuette for portraying the fiery, independent-minded Anita in 1961, is the living link in Spielberg’s version, this time playing the strong-willed Valentina, proprietor of Doc’s drugstore where Tony (Ansel Elgort) works and lives in the basement. Just as Robbins/Bernstein/Sondheim/Laurents reworked Shakespeare’s immortal love story to make it relevant to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, 60 years later, Spielberg and leftist playwright/screenwriter Tony Kushner have repurposed the classic with a sense of intense urgency and relevancy for the United States today.
The Jets’ racism has been amplified; they mouth white nationalist slogans while battling to maintain control of their dwindling turf in a changing Manhattan. The two-and-a-half-hour epic opens at the tenements being devastated by urban renewal wrecking balls, as the Jets, led by Riff (Mike Faist), emerge from a basement with what looks like buckets of paint.
They then splatter paint over a Puerto Rican flag mural, which incites the Sharks, led by Bernardo (David Alvarez), to fight them until Officer Krupke (Brian d’Arcy James) and Lieutenant Schrank (Corey Stoller) arrive and break it up.
After dispersing, the Jets and Sharks plan to meet up that night to plot a rumble to settle scores at a school gym dance. But the shindig has unintended consequences, as Tony, a Jet, meets Shark Bernardo’s younger sister, Maria (Rachel Zegler), and they experience immediate attraction.
I attended a private screening of “West Side Story” at the Directors Guild of America’s theater in Hollywood. When it concluded, Spielberg appeared, telling his directorial peers: “Robert Wise’s 1961 version was a classic for all time. But I made our film for this time. It is about xenophobia and hate — and love.” As a US commonwealth, Puerto Ricans are US citizens, but as the movie dramatizes, they face many of the same struggles against prejudice that other immigrants do.
During the screening, film historian Luis Reyes, a Puerto Rican New Yorker and co-author of “Hispanics in Hollywood,” told me he was impressed with the movie’s realism, featuring Latinx actors in the Puerto Rican roles (in 1961, non-Latinx Natalie Wood and George Chakiris co-starred as Maria and Bernardo). He applauded the fact that the “Multi-ethnic skin color diversity spectrum of Puerto Ricans was well handled.” Reyes also pointed out that Latinx people speak Spanish with different accents, and in this West Side Story, actors spoke “authentic Puerto Rican and Nuyorican Spanish dialogue.”
Spielberg said that “95 percent of the dialogue” in the 2021 rendition is new and original, differing from the lines penned by Laurents in 1957 and Ernest Lehman in 1961.
Of course, music is essential to “West Side Story,” and Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel presided over the New York Philharmonic’s 110-piece orchestra to record Bernstein’s jazzy score in all its glory. If Kushner rewrote most of Laurents and Lehman’s text, the exquisite lyrics of the late Stephen Sondheim still stand in all of their grandeur and beauty in numbers such as “Maria,” “Tonight,” “I Feel Pretty,” and the poignant anthem of hope, “Somewhere,” sung solo by Moreno.
As for “America,” Spielberg felt he couldn’t surpass Wise’s perfect 1961 rendition, so instead of staging Anita’s signature song on the rooftops, he moved the number down to the New York streets, where the ebullient Sharks and their girlfriends gather with fellow Puerto Ricans.
I haven’t been so moved by a movie in years. In “West Side Story,” Spielberg renders a stupendous cinematic production against racism and hate, for love and tolerance during these troubled, divisive times. The 2021 version of “West Side Story” is nothing less than another musical masterpiece, and like its predecessors, it’s sure to win well-deserved accolades.
“West Side Story” was released Dec. 10 in theaters everywhere.
Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. This first appeared at Progressive.org.
From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2022
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