Spielberg’s Masterful West Side Story Takes Us There

If you are lucky, you get to live through the era of Steven Spielberg, a restless, imaginative artist who has been making movies almost as long as I’ve been alive. Like the handful of great directors still making movies from the 1970s, Spielberg knows that you can’t simply make the same movie over and over again and last over 40 years. You have to challenge yourself, try something new, even if that something new is considered a “failure.” To be really great, I mean in the pantheon, you have to be able to use different muscles. 

Spielberg has made everything from Jaws, a movie that shaped my childhood, through Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Close Encounters, Schindler’s List, Munich, Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, Minority Report, The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, A.I., War of the Worlds, Jurassic Park. But he’s also made Catch Me if You Can, Always, Hook, and The Post. He can dip in and out of almost every genre. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. He never takes it too personally. Instead, he gets back to work. 

He makes movies because he has to. The best of them do. They don’t stop, even if people tell them to stop, even if people stop watching their movies. They are compelled to do it and are doing it for reasons beyond approval from critics, their peers or Oscar voters. They do it because they love doing it.  

Spielberg has been nominated for producer 10 times, won twice. He’s been nominated for Best Director 6 times, won twice. The DGA has nominated him 11 times. Through the years, I’ve watched him be celebrated, blamed, revered, mocked. Through all of it, though, he has remained humble at his core. He is partly an innate genius who has an eye for perfect shots and a knack at building suspense. He’s also very good at knowing what an audience will be moved by, what they will respond to.  

But even knowing all of this still did not prepare me for just how good his version of West Side Story is. I mean, I know, DUH. But still. I guess I felt like West Side Story is one of the greatest films ever made. Why remake it? That’s like remaking Casablanca or Citizen Kane. You can’t. What I couldn’t see, though, was that Spielberg wasn’t remaking the Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins version. He respects them too much to even try. No, instead, he and writer Tony Kushner were telling a different story, one that very much resonates with what Americans are feeling right now.

This will mean different things for different people. The low hanging fruit for the Left will be: this is about Trump supporters and the message to take away is they’re bad and racist and they deserve to be dehumanized. But that is exactly the wrong message to take from West Side Story, this or any other version. The message is exactly the opposite, that dehumanization is always wrong. It is the thing we need to take us to war, to take us to genocide. In order to kill other people we have to see them as no longer human, and thus are deserving of the worst crimes against humanity. It’s true of animals, too. We could not eat them if we could not dehumanize them. That is why, probably, we use the word “pig” or “cow” as a slur. 

West Side Story is shows what dehumanization looks like, whether it’s based on racism, or fear or hatred – it is contagious. It not only spreads from person to person but it’s often the requirement of belonging to one tribe or the other: you must hate them to belong. Given what we’re going through now, I fully braced myself for a one-sided approach to West Side Story for a 2021 update. We are absolutely in a place where each side has dehumanized the other side. It seems to be everywhere, hatred, all of the time. But surprisingly, writer Tony Kushner does not do that. He stays faithful to the intent of the Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet – putting pure love at the center of pure hate, and the original film version of West Side Story. 

Their last collaboration together was Lincoln. It, too, was about a time in our country where two sides faced off of each other. Lincoln, of course, was finding a way to bring the two sides together, while not forgiving the darker aspects of that war, like racism and slavery. So too is it always necessary to remember that what racism actually is, why it’s bad is that it dehumanizes people based on their skin color. But any group can be dehumanized for what they believe, how they look, where they live, where they come from. It is to be avoided at all costs because it is the absolute rock bottom of what humans are capable of, from the Holocaust to Jim Crow to the witch trials – it has never been a good look and is always something to be confronted and eradicated. 

The original West Side Story needed to subvert some of its messaging, particularly with the character of Anybodys, what we would have called a “tomboy” back then but maybe today gay or transgender. There is a scene in the original that also deals with masculinity with one of the characters but that is not shown in this version. In that scene, a more sensitive male character was bullied into being tougher. Here, that is woven into the Tony character, played by the enigmatic, charismatic Ansel Elgort.

The spine and heart of the material – that is the music and lyrics – Leonard Bernstein and the dearly departed Stephen Sondheim – is so good that you don’t have to do much but get out of its way. The songs are just that powerful. Here, though, we have the added collaborative efforts of writer Kushner and director Spielberg who have made a different movie than the original. It isn’t necessary to compare them because they are good in different ways.  What is remarkable about the musical itself, whether on stage or on film, is what it says, how it sounds, and above all, how it makes us feel. 

The performances are exceptional across the board. Newcomer Rachel Zegler is a different Maria from Natalie Wood’s version. There is never a moment where she isn’t believable as the famous Maria/Juliet. The scenes between Zegler and Elgort are as magical and romantic as they need to be. Just as the end is as heartbreaking as it always is. The doomed lovers trying to escape an ongoing war. 

Rita Moreno has been given a central role in this new version, as though we are seeing the movie through Anita’s eyes as a much older woman. Her presence is magnetic and profound, especially in the key scene of near-assault by the younger Anita. It brings a whole new meaning to that scene which is just as hard to watch in this version as in the original. 

The showstopper in this version of West Side Story, like the original, is the song America sung here by Ariana DeBose, who, it must be said, burns through this movie like a wind-driven wildfire. How much this character loves America is juxtaposed by how the dynamics between the rival gangs eventually drives her hatred of America and her desire to leave and never return. DeBose stands out not just because she has the best part in the movie but because she brings to it sensuality and vulnerability. 

There is no getting around this film feeling very much like what we’re living through now, in so many different ways. And just as its message by the end is that we need to see each other as human beings and not warring tribes probably isn’t a lesson learned on the West Side back in the 1950s. Probably those gangs still fought, still hated each other and more people died. But it isn’t the job of the movie to fix society.  It couldn’t anyway. But art can shine a light into the darker corners of our reality. And in so doing, reveal what is really there versus what we are afraid might be. 

West Side Story is the story of America in a nutshell. It has been built and made by immigrants. At its core, it’s the land of the free, with its arms open. But because people live here too, but its greatness can only be measured by the people in it. You can’t watch either version of West Side Story and not be brought to tears by Anita’s trajectory and not want this country to be what she once thought it was. 

Spielberg has made, without question, one of the best films of the year.