West Side Story, review: Steven Spielberg's modern remake is stunning
Christina Newland
From the beautiful choreography to the glorious musical numbers, this is a joy to behold. But in trying so close to stay faithful to the 1961 original, it fails to infuse this Romeo and Juliet tragedy with anything fresh
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inews.co.uk
Rest assured that you’re in good hands when you sit down to watch a new Steven Spielberg movie.

His remake of Robert Wise’s stone-cold musical classic from 1961, West Side Story, is beautifully made, stunningly choreographed with inspiration from the original (Jerome Robbins was no slouch in that department) and features a trademark Spielberg sense of occasion.

His swooping, panning camera, the glorious use of framing and physical space, and the panache of his restaged musical numbers from the Sondheim playbook, from “Tonight” to “America”, are joyful to behold, particularly in light of the legendary songwriter’s death aged 91 just last week. And yet West Side Story 2.0 feels like less than the sum of its parts.

Even with Spielberg’s flair and intelligence as a visual storyteller, some grumbled about remaking a film as beloved and of-its-time as this one. Its message of racial and class unity feels evergreen, but it’s hardly doing anything fresh or unfamiliar by 2021 standards.

Spielberg’s version is largely faithful to the original text: this is the Romeo and Juliet retelling you already know, set among NYC street gangs of 1957: the white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. The key change is the recasting of Puerto Rican actors in roles that were originally played by white actors in brown-face makeup, an important one by any metric.

Here, Tony (Ansel Elgort, a drip playing a drip), a senior but reluctant member of the Jets, falls in love with the leader of the Sharks’ little sister, Maria (Rachel Zegler, a kewpie doll-eyed ingénue). Her protective brother Bernardo (an appealingly brutish David Alvarez) and his girlfriend, streetwise Anita (Ariana Debose, as fearsomely sparkling in the role as Rita Moreno in the original, for which she won an Oscar) try to protect Maria, backsliding into the inevitable tragedy of the rumble between the two gangs.

Moreno, 89 and the only original member of the West Side Story cast who was Puerto Rican and playing a Puerto Rican, has a lovely supporting role as Valentina, the woman who runs the local drugstore and has – appropriately – seen this all before. As such, the performances are almost uniformly strong. Elgort, though, remains a weak point, unable to carry off the emotional heavy-lifting at the centre of the story.

Although Spielberg cleverly restages many of the film’s major musical sequences – including a danger-ridden argument between Elgort’s Tony and his pal Riff (a wiry, dynamic Mike Faist in a stand-out role) set to “Cool” – there’s something flat about the result.

In between sequences, Elgort seems awkward and wooden; if West Side Story was simply singing and dancing, it might be a masterpiece, but it’s when everyone gets to talking that there’s an inherent staleness.

In spite of so much looking and feeling right, there is a kind of void within, a sense that it is proficient at this modern retelling without ever really infusing the story with fresh life or giving us a sense of why it is being retold right now.

Although it attempts to gently update the gender and racial politics of the original – emphasising the poor treatment of a trans character and using visceral racial epithets not found in the ’61 version – it still feels like a golden oldie, containing all the strengths and flaws of the original film rather than one willing to stand on its own two feet. Perhaps if it had been willing to more deeply examine the themes of racism, white supremacy, gentrification, and policing that it touches on, it might have soared higher.

In the end, as impressive as West Side Story is – and sometimes it has flashes of real brilliance – it winds up all feeling rather pointless.