West Side Story reviews

[OscarGuy]

Yeah. He's gone a bit off the deep end. He's become heavily anti-trans (think worse than JK Rowling). I stopped following him (or unfriended) because it was honestly just a bunch of ignorant ramblings about the topic. He had SOME good points early on, but he just kept going down a rabbit hole.

[Reza]

Penelope came up with the best title for this Spielberg.

Woke Side Story.

How would you know? Do you follow him on Twitter?

Nope we are friends on Facebook.

[flipp525]

Penelope came up with the best title for this Spielberg.

Woke Side Story.

How would you know? Do you follow him on Twitter?

[Okri]

From Christopher Saunders, director of Lilo and Stitch among others

"Jeffrey Katzenberg once flew me out to New York City because he wanted us to do West Side Story with cats. I boarded this huge sequence where these cats were battling each other. Jeffrey said, “We’re going to fly to New York, and you’re going to pitch it to Leonard Bernstein.” All of a sudden, I was on Disney’s corporate jet. I went to the room and I set up all the boards, and I practiced and I practiced and I practiced. As it turned out, Leonard Bernstein didn’t show up for the meeting. He sent representatives. I’m sure they were people of some prominence; there was one woman in particular who had a lot of necklaces on. But you could tell it wasn’t going well. Like, Oh, I think we may have made a mistake by coming here."

Not quite John Guare, but close.

[Reza]

Penelope came up with the best title for this Spielberg.

Woke Side Story.

[Sabin]

Second viewing. Same opinion. Brilliant direction, but we should probably go back in time and give Ernest Lehman the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, right? Lord knows, if a film goes 10/11, the script did something right and this (for me) is the proof. I keep losing track of the rumble. That... isn't supposed to happen.

This movie is beautiful. Just crackling, alive filmmaking that took my breath away but never transported me with the power of love. Mike D'Angelo correctly described it as having "copy of a copy" murkiness. The biggest problem that I see on second viewing is that Kushner (and Spielberg) clearly put so much thought into how to re-stage this film to be released in 2021 (all fine and good), but I don't know how much of that thought was centered around how to boost the emotional power of Tony/Maria's story. We never quite feel the madness that they desperately need to get away from and that's a major problem. I'll also say that Tony never quite comes into view. Ansel Egort is a little better than I remember, but he really only gets a brief moment to register before the dance: a convo with Riff, a chat with Valentina, and then "Something's Coming" which he decidedly doesn't make his own and open up a window to his soul. Spielberg does though. It's a shame he's said he isn't going to make another musical. He's an excellent fit for them.

I can't say I totally understand the love for Ariana DeBose, but I get it a little bit more. I never quite felt like I understood this Anita, but every moment she was on-screen I was so aware of how much talent I was seeing. Which is sort of how I felt about the film as a whole.

[Mister Tee]

A corollary thought: the Boy Like That/I Have a Love duet is the last song listed for Act Two – but there’s a lot of action that follows: Anita’s arrival at Doc’s, her taunting, the twisted message, Doc (Valentina) informing Tony, the tragic finale. It’s got to be 10 minutes or more and, while there’s underscore for both the taunting and the walk-off finale, there’s not another song. Can anyone think of any other famous musical that ends so far from its last song?

On further research, I guess 1776 would be another example -- the long scene of agreeing to and finally signing the Declaration is totally without music.

Of course, the snarky among us would say pretty much the whole show is without music. A solid enough book, but worst score for a major musical I can ever remember.

[Mister Tee]

A corollary thought: the Boy Like That/I Have a Love duet is the last song listed for Act Two – but there’s a lot of action that follows: Anita’s arrival at Doc’s, her taunting, the twisted message, Doc (Valentina) informing Tony, the tragic finale. It’s got to be 10 minutes or more and, while there’s underscore for both the taunting and the walk-off finale, there’s not another song. Can anyone think of any other famous musical that ends so far from its last song?

The last song in the aforementioned South Pacific before the reprise of "Dites-Moi" at the very end of the film version is "This Nearly Was Mine" sung by Emile De Becque (Rossano Brazzi dubbed by Giorgio Tozzi) before he goes off with Lt. Joe Cable (John Kerr) in the long action sequence that precedes the finale.

I thought about that one, but 1) I was thinking of the stage play, and I'm not sure how long a gap it is there (I know in the movie it takes a lot of time, but that's because they can show action footage); plus, according to IBDB, there's a reprise of Some Enchanted Evening sung by Nellie before the finale; and 2) even at that, the final moment is most definitely sung: DeBecque joining in Dites-Moi is the emotional climax, and it's just seconds before curtain.

South Pacific is an oddity at the start, as well. Again there's Dites-Moi, but the ensuing scene between DeBecque and Forbush is a lot more talky than most musicals would allow.

Anyone have any other candidates to suggest?

[Big Magilla]

I appreciate Kushner’s efforts at putting the story into a more timely context (the gentrification angle) and toughening up the characters (making Tony an ex-con; the gun purchase), but he doesn’t really go all the way with the latter -- Tony almost feels more saintly for how much he regrets what landed him in jail. Beyond that, these touches are at odds with what is, at heart, a swoony, across-a-crowded-room love story – one that posits tragic death will bring surviving gang members into a brotherhood-of-man common pall-bearing. Making feints at realism only emphasizes the sentimental core.

Love the references to South Pacific and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

A corollary thought: the Boy Like That/I Have a Love duet is the last song listed for Act Two – but there’s a lot of action that follows: Anita’s arrival at Doc’s, her taunting, the twisted message, Doc (Valentina) informing Tony, the tragic finale. It’s got to be 10 minutes or more and, while there’s underscore for both the taunting and the walk-off finale, there’s not another song. Can anyone think of any other famous musical that ends so far from its last song?

The last song in the aforementioned South Pacific before the reprise of "Dites-Moi" at the very end of the film version is "This Nearly Was Mine" sung by Emile De Becque (Rossano Brazzi dubbed by Giorgio Tozzi) before he goes off with Lt. Joe Cable (John Kerr) in the long action sequence that precedes the finale.

[Mister Tee]

My fears about West Side Story were pretty much borne out: I'm simply too over-familiar with the material to have any kind of fresh reaction to it. I’m not like that guy posted down below; I haven’t seen the '61 movie 20 times -- in fact, I'm not sure how many times I've watched it end-to-end. I did see it when it first hit “the neighborhoods” (Spring of 1963, Sunnyside theatre). I think I watched it again when it first showed up on network TV, and maybe parts once or twice more on TCM. And, for the record, I saw a stage production: a Lincoln Center revival in 1968.

But that’s not why it’s so ingrained in me. Well before I first saw the movie, I'd ingested the show through the Broadway cast album. My parents had seen (and adored) the original production, and we played the album incessantly on our home stereo. I don’t think I’ve listened to it in decades now, but the sense-memory is extraordinarily strong: before I was halfway through the Prologue of this new film, I realized I was with it almost note-for-note. By an hour or so in -- certainly by the time of the Maria/Tonight sequences – I was mentally singing along with everything (I even knew the exact moment the voice from the window behind Maria would interrupt the singing). Except for America (whose lyrics had already been tinkered with for the ’61 movie – the Rita Moreno documentary explains) and a few tweaks to Officer Krupke, the musical portions of the film are more or less identical to what I listened to 60 years ago. (Even the Somewhere ballet music shows up, albeit in a different spot; and Cool may be newly contextualized, but the arrangement/orchestrations feel exactly the same.)

Between this and the, let’s be honest, not deeply complex story-line, it was pretty much impossible for me to be engaged with this film in any what-happens-next way. All I could do was note any changes made for this new version, many of them rather marginal. About them:

I appreciate Kushner’s efforts at putting the story into a more timely context (the gentrification angle) and toughening up the characters (making Tony an ex-con; the gun purchase), but he doesn’t really go all the way with the latter -- Tony almost feels more saintly for how much he regrets what landed him in jail. Beyond that, these touches are at odds with what is, at heart, a swoony, across-a-crowded-room love story – one that posits tragic death will bring surviving gang members into a brotherhood-of-man common pall-bearing. Making feints at realism only emphasizes the sentimental core.

And I deeply question one structural choice Kushner made: setting the terms of the rumble before leaving the gym. In earlier versions, wondering what would happen at the war council at Doc’s put added weight onto the numbers subsequent to Tony/Maria on the fire escape. Eliminating that tension, for me, left a big narrative dead spot in the middle part of the movie. (Aside from Tony and Maria’s mock marriage, there’s almost no forward plot motion in that stretch, till the rumble.) As a result, those numbers -- America and Gee, Officer Krupke – become…just numbers. America, in the original (both play and film), is a debate on immigrant identity, assimilation vs. tradition-holding, at a fraught moment when the Sharks are about to go to war over their status. Here, while some lyrics are still on-topic, it’s staged as a street carnival that wouldn’t be out of place in In the Heights. Krupke, in the ’61 movie (or Cool, which had that spot in the Broadway version) is the Jets’ desperate effort not to show their naked fear at the situation they’ve stepped into. Here, it shows up because…I don’t know; where else would they put it? It may be hard for that number to land with anything like the comic force it originally had – the terminology of the J.D. era is long passe – but I can’t remember seeing any version where it felt like such a complete bust as it does here, with no real context.

In fact, I guess I might as well confess, I don’t comprehend the immense praise Spielberg has received for his staging throughout. Most of the other numbers are competently enough put on, but many (the Prologue, Jet Song, Dance at the Gym, Maria, I Feel Pretty) feel quite reminiscent of the earlier version. I did like Tony’s gymnastics on the fire escape, and Cool – while I struggled to adjust to its changed meaning – definitely had a freshness to it. But too much of the movie felt like a typical West Side Story; I didn’t get the special zing Spielberg has provided in so many movies in the past. Others seem to; I wish I did.

(Allow me a parenthetical: the America number – and an earlier scene in the film – locates itself by street sign at 68th and Broadway. This happens to be the precise location of the theatre where I watched the movie. There’s of course been a lot of “urban renewal” of the upper West Side since the time of the movie, but I remember it back a long way -- and Broadway in that spot was never the bodega-dotted area where this number takes place. Which is to say, this is another NY-set movie that’s indifferent to actual NY history, which bugs the crap out of me.)

A thought about the set design in general: the demolished buildings were not a bad idea (though over-used, I thought – especially in the final sequence), but they would have worked better had they not felt so heavily CGI-ed. Honestly, at times, I found myself thinking, Wall-E’s comparable settings felt less cartoony. Also on the visuals: I seem to be in a deep minority, but I didn’t care for Kaminski’s work here. I find a sameness to his work with Spielberg over the past two decades: this is no doubt over-simplification, but it feels to me like he just puts a shroud of gray over everything. This was perfect for Saving Private Ryan, but I’ve wearied of it since, including here, and find myself longing for the days when Spielberg used (R.I.P.) Allen Daviau or Vilmos Zsigmond.

Spielberg tries his best to give the Sharks their due – even listing them first in the end credits – but I realized, watching, that this show is ultimately conceived from the Jets’ point of view, and there’s only so much you can do to camouflage that. This is especially true when it comes to musical numbers: the Jets have the Jet Song, Krupke and Cool (plus Tony’s Something’s Coming). The only two Sharks songs – America and I Feel Pretty – go primarily to their girls, characters whose names we don’t even learn. Kushner does do some good work in the dialogue scenes – filling out the Bernardo/Chino relationship, in particular; Chino’s clear gratitude to his friend makes him more than a blind avenger at the finale. (I do have to question the take-off-glasses-and-show-what-a-hunk-I-am moment – it was uncomfortably reminiscent of “Why, Miss Jones: till you took those glasses off, I didn’t notice you were a knockout.”) Kudos, also, for the image of Chino and Tony teaming up to raise the warehouse door – maybe my favorite new thing in the movie.

Rita Moreno’s character also strikes a blow for the Puerto Rican side of the street, and I found her scenes among the most interesting -- no doubt partly because they were something new. But I also had the nagging feeling her presence was throwing the plot somewhat out of whack. An underlying premise of the material is that, while the Jets and Sharks occupy the same turf, they travel in different social worlds, which makes them blindly hate one another. Valentina, though, seems to have been Tony’s friend a long time, and Anita also seems quite familiar with her – which suggests the divide has been bridged in some ways. It’s not like this is fatal to the story, but it struck me as a noble idea that hadn’t been thought all the way through.

As for the other actors: Zegler has a fine voice and a fresh presence, but Maria is still very much an ingenue role, and it baffles me she’s being promoted for acting honors. At the other end: Elgort has had bitter Internet enmity for off-screen reasons, and I wonder if that’s led to some reviews suggesting he sticks out like a sore thumb. I didn’t find him brilliant – he’s limited by the role – but I didn’t think he stunk the joint out, either. Faist was my favorite – his twitchy, barely-concealed sense of menace made Riff into something he didn’t approach in Russ Tamblyn’s rendition. DeBose I liked enough, but I can’t understand the groundswell for her – bloggers seem convinced she’s running away with supporting actress. And I had trouble with her big scene: the delivery of the false message. Any other time I’ve seen it, Anita’s blurted it out in a moment of (understandable) blind rage. Here, it’s delivered rather coolly. That could be an interesting choice: to know she’s betraying her friend Maria, and deliberately choose to do so. But I didn’t see the layers in her decision; I couldn’t tell if she’d processed all that, or if she was just playing female avenger. So, the moment didn’t fully work for me.

Something that jumped out at me, thinking about the play (in tandem with the two movies): in neither film version have the creators opted to use Gee Officer, Krupke in its original spot: as comic relief to offset the downbeat slide of the story. In fact, I noticed, in the Broadway version, two of the only 4-5 second act numbers – I Feel Pretty and Krupke – are there as mood-lighteners. As much as the show was daringly tragic for Broadway in the era of My Fair Lady and The Music Man, the creators evidently felt the need to offset the gloom as much as possible -- something neither film felt has felt necessary.

A corollary thought: the Boy Like That/I Have a Love duet is the last song listed for Act Two – but there’s a lot of action that follows: Anita’s arrival at Doc’s, her taunting, the twisted message, Doc (Valentina) informing Tony, the tragic finale. It’s got to be 10 minutes or more and, while there’s underscore for both the taunting and the walk-off finale, there’s not another song. Can anyone think of any other famous musical that ends so far from its last song?

[Reza]

That long memory post is absolutely right on. He perfectly nails it about the original vs the tepid remake.

[Big Magilla]

20 plus times in six months 30 years ago.

When I was the house usher in my neighborhood theater after school and on weekends around that time, I would often work an 8-hour day. I saw a lot of films numerous times in one week though I would be busy and not be watching every film every minute, but I did see enough to have indelible memories of many of them. But memorize every moment of any one of them? No.

Memory plays tricks and people change over time. There are films that you love at one point in your life, and at another, wonder what you thought was so great about it in the first place. There are others that you didn't like at first viewing but grow to like over time. Then there are those that you love no matter how many times you've seen them and those that you despise no matter how many times to try to view them objectively.

I haven't seen Spielberg's film yet, and don't know where I will come out on it overall, but one of my most vivid memories of Wise and Robbins' film is "America" sung and danced to at the gym. I did wince a little when I saw it being performed in the street in the trailer for the Spielberg. "Not where that song should be performed" I remember thinking to myself when I saw it.

[Okri]

I mean, they've seen the original film 20+ times. Forget memorable, I would expect anyone to have it memorized by then.

[Big Magilla]

From another poster on the same site:

I won't belabor my history with the original film other than to say I saw it for the first time on its second day at the Grauman's Chinese and over twenty times thereafter in the first six months of its roadshow engagement there (it played over a year). The film was a game-changer for film musicals, and it was a life-changer for me. I was, in fact, obsessed with it. I found not a single thing to criticize, including Mr. Beymer, Miss Wood and everyone and everything else. The stuff I read online on Facebook, etc. would lead you to believe that casting Miss Wood was a criminal act, and that Mr. Beymer was truly horrible, a beginner who couldn't act. The problem with the former is that Natalie Wood had a name and they needed that for the film. The other fact, and I'd wager it IS a fact - is that there were no Puerto Rican actresses auditioning for the film at that time for that role, who could sing and act it. As to Mr. Beymer, he was hardly a newcomer, having started in film and TV as a child, and he’d already had two major roles in The Diary of Anne Frank and Blake Edwards’ daffy High Time.

They also act like it was some soft piece of puff pastry, especially The Rumble. Well, no, I hate to tell you that no one thought that Rumble was soft or silly - when Riff gets it there was an audible gasp at every performance I attended. And at the end, in the brilliantly thought out and edited final sequence, the weeping in the theater was unbelievable - at every single performance. And that was mostly Mr. Wise's cinema sense and Miss Wood's acting ability. My love for the original has never abated.

Now, I think Mr. Spielberg is a great director, a true filmmaker with a true filmmaker's eye for composition and staging. He's made some incredibly great movies - in fact, several would probably make my top thirty, I'm sure. But like ALL filmmakers, he's not infallible. He's made movies that I've absolutely loathed - for example, 1941, Always, Hook, the second and fourth Indiana Jones movies, War of the Worlds - those come to mind instantly. And then there are movies I merely find okay. His self-important films grate on me, and there’ve been a few of those, I'm afraid. And stuff like Ready Player One and TinTin or whatever that thing was are just baffling to me. But even those films are well done from a directorial and visual standpoint. He's always solid that way. He’s simply one of the greats.

Do I think a remake of West Side Story was essential? Of course not. Especially for the reasons it was done - to cast it more appropriately being the main one. But I don't scream to the high heavens about it - he wanted to make it and he did and good for him. All we viewers have is what's up on the screen. And I thought what was up on the screen was very well made. A lot of online people RAVE about how the characters now have backstories - to which I say, really? Because I feel the Jets and Sharks from the original are much more memorable. I didn't even know until the end of the film who Ice was or who A-Rab was or who Action was. So much for backstories. In the original film, each of those characters were identifiable and majorly so. In the end, I enjoyed seeing it. It looked and sounded excellent. And some of it worked really well and the thing I thought worked really well is the thing that most of the critics went on about - that Maria and Tony are ciphers and that the film and stage show is not really about them. Even the Facebook people don’t like Mr. Elgort. But this new version gets their relationship just right. After hearing so much whining about Elgort, an actor I don't like at all, imagine my surprise to find his performance terrific - I thought the whole Maria song and sequence was cinematically wonderful, save for the birds – that was a little too Mary Poppins for me. The entire Tonight sequence was also terrific. They were, in fact, they only things that I found remotely emotional in the film. What really shines is probably what’s keeping the kiddies far way – the score. It's a classic show score – couldn’t be better. But the kiddies don’t like when someone just starts singing out of nowhere.

And now we get to my biggest issue with the film - the complete rewrite by Tony Kushner. Some of it's fine, especially the Tony/Maria stuff. What's missing now is any humor at all and you need the humor, it's essential. It's what Robbins knew all too well and why his Prologue will never ever be surpassed. The new film's Prologue starts at warp speed and never lets up - the original gets you into the rivalry slowly and builds and builds, and the choreography of Robbins created a whole new dance vocabulary. I'm not a fan of Justin Peck - none of his choreography seems to come from character - a lot of angular steps and thrusting and leaping and bopping around. His Dance at the Gym fails for me because the rivalry in Robbins' choreography is not there or certainly not there in a way that has the impact and build of the original, with the rivals trying to continually top each other – in other words, the dance tells a story. And with the sure-fire showstopper, Gee, Officer Krupke, there wasn't a single laugh from the audience and when that song doesn’t land or get a laugh you know something's wrong - it was the worst number in the film, for me.

One of the strongest things in the original film are the characters of Bernardo and Anita and it's kind of what puts the audience almost on the side of the Sharks. Because Bernardo has charm, and Anita is funny and they're so likable together. That's why America works so beautifully in the original. Putting it on the streets is just silly - the rooftop keeps it focused and about what it's supposed to be about. And again, watch how Robbins builds the number - it's why it got applause at every single showing. In the new one, it's just a lot of color and sound and fury and not serving the intention of the number, which, by the way, is the version from the original film rather than the stage show – with the Shark girls AND boys.

I liked Rachel Zegler quite a bit. She’s charming, sings well, and the camera really likes her. But what should be her finest moment in the film, the ending sequence, well, that's the one place where I think Spielberg errs completely. You never feel the power and shock of the moment when Tony sees Maria and she sees him, he realizes she's alive, and as they run to each other, the sudden cut to Chino with the gun. Again, the gasp from the audience was huge because it was a perfectly edited sequence. Here, Chino is in the wrong place for it to have the impact it should. And then Maria's big speech is underscored, which I think was a mistake. The scene just lacks the power the original had, especially the genius moment when they lift Tony up and one of the Sharks steps in to help. That moment here is a throwaway that barely registers.

I also liked the additions for Officer Krupke and Schrank and some of the new dialogue was fine. I do think all that Spanish, which is always followed by "Speak English" - well, it's a little too much with some important lines not having the impact they should have. It’s okay to have the Spanish, but subtitles really were necessary.

All in all, I'm glad I saw it and I did enjoy some of it. I do think it will get a lot of nominations and may even win a few. I kind of think the handwriting is on the wall in terms of box-office but that’s the way it goes sometimes.

[Reza]

And alongside the film, the soundtrack LP was a massive seller throughout 1962-63. It still holds the record for the album that spent the most weeks at #1. 54 weeks as the #1 album in America. A record that likely won’t ever be broken as the #2 album is Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” at a mere 37 weeks at #1.

I still have my parents' soundtrack LP which I remember hearing all through my childhood and well into my teens. I was born a year after the movie came out so I must have been around 4 or 5 when I first heard the songs - "Tonight" and "America" being favorites.