Critic’s rating: ★★★
(156 minutes; PG-13)
Movie musicals aren’t exactly my favorite genre — I can mostly take or leave the ones made since the form peaked during a potent 35-year period ending in the late ’60s.
Nevertheless I had high hopes for Steven Spielberg‘s update of the 1961 Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins film (adapted from the stage musical) about star-crossed lovers.
The riff on Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” as most know, centers on the culture-clash romance between Maria, a Catholic girl from Puerto Rico and Polish-Irish kid Tony. Amping up the drama, of course, is the youth-gang rivalry between the white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks in New York City’s San Juan Hill, circa the mid-’50s. There will be blood, and love, and collateral damage. Not everyone gets out alive.
Having marveled at the snappy, beautifully edited trailer, I wanted to make sure that I experienced the movie on the big screen. My gut reaction to the exuberant romantic drama, when the credits rolled: Is there anything that Spielberg CAN’T do? The dancing and balletic fighting are expertly, artfully staged, explosions of movement and sound. It’s hard not to get caught up in the sheer motion, momentum and color of those scenes.
The singing is a cut above — mostly pleasant, sometimes inspired, and not overdone. And the performances, particularly by Ansel Elgort (Tony), Rachel Zegler (Maria), Ariana DeBose (Anita), David Alvarez (Bernardo), and especially Rita Moreno, 90 (Anita in the original film), range from passable to moderately compelling. Is there chemistry between the leads, anything to explain why they’re determined to keep their love alive in the face of obvious obstacles? Not so sure. But they look good together
And yet, and yet. Sixty years later, and in the face of a rising tide of openly aggressive dog whistling, and a rising tide of white supremacy in America, Spielberg does little to nothing to update the racial issues inherent to the story, zilch to reanimate the issue with some kind of narrative tweaks that might have made his “West Side Story” feel more relevant.
His version, sorry to say, aside from the attention-getting choreography, simply feels moldy. Did I mention that it’s overlong?
Yes, Spielberg boasts the expertise and passion to make any kind of movie he’d like to make. And so he did, bringing “West Side Story” back from the dead. But he mostly left me wondering why I should care, and why one of America’s greatest living directors felt compelled to take on the challenge.
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