West Side Story Preview

Steven Spielberg presents West Side Story.   It's amazing that this 2021 version is only the second full length feature film to be made from the popular musical, and the first was in 1961.  If you don't know the story, two children from warring families fall in love at first sight.  Of course, their families forbid their romance.  All Tony and Maria want is to be free, to end the fighting, and to be together.  Spoiler alert: it doesn't end well.

West Side Story was first written by legendary Broadway team of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim in 1957.  It was transformed into a movie in 1961 and has been performed in nearly every high school auditorium, college campus, or theatre venue that can take on a musical production.  It is a modern retelling of Shakespeare's 1597 Romeo and Juliet except it is set in New York instead of Verona, it's the Jets and the Sharks instead of the Capulets and Montagues, and it's song and dance instead of thees and thous.  

So, we all get the gist of the story, many of us have seen West Side Story in some capacity.  Some of us may have even performed in a production.  So what makes this one special?  Well, it's Steven Spielberg.  Spielberg exploded on the scene in 1975 with back-to-back hits in Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  His success continued with Indiana Jones and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.  His genius in epic dramas was on full display in The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, and Schindler's List.  His ability to break the barriers of film technology shone in Jurassic Park.  Hit after hit just kept coming: Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, Minority Report, The Terminal, Munich Lincoln.  And now, West Side Story.

Spielberg's West Side has been nominated for 7 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director.  However, this is a tough one to predict.   It's been 60 years since someone attempted to make a West Side Story film.  But, it's not like a typical "remake" like The Day the Earth Stood Still or Planet of the Apes or Psycho or even Spider-Man or Superman.  In those remakes, fans are expecting to see a new, different, modern, hopefully better version of the original.  There's only so much you can change with West Side Story, or any Broadway musical.  Fans are actually expecting the songs and dialogue to be the same ones they've always known.  So then, what can go wrong?  The ability to stage a production on a Hollywood set have gotten exponentially better since the 1960's, so this should be a much better version by virtue of 60 years of advanced technology in film making, right?

Well, Baz Luhrmann proved that there are still many choices that can affect the film.  In 1996, Lurhmann brought a modern version of Romeo and Juliet to the big screen.  He kept Shakespeare's script in it's original Elizabethan, but set it to modern times in Verona Beach with guns instead of rapiers.  It was a wonderful concept.  For me, the problem was that the actors didn't seem to understand the words they were saying.  It felt like reading lines off a page.  However, you watch any Shakespeare from Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, you get a much better performance of the lines.

Spielberg clearly has taken advantage of his abilities as a film maker and the modern technologies available to him in West Side Story.  No, there's no dinosaurs or aliens.  But there are sweeping epic camera shots that just weren't possible in 1961.  Back then, it looked very much like it was filmed on a very large theatre stage.  However, Spielberg appears to have made the decision to keep the look and the feel (costumes, buildings, hairstyles, cars) of the 1960's.  What it's really going to come down to is the performances.

Ansel Elgort plays Tony and I'm honestly skeptical.  We don't see him sing in the previews.  And he's the pouty-faced pretty-boy from movies like Baby Driver, The Goldfinch, and Billionaire Boys Club.  And we have a wild card in lead actress Rachel Zegler in the role of Maria.  This is Rachel's first feature film credit.  In fact, this is the first on screen performance of any kind for Rachel.  However, she is slated to play the lead in the upcoming live-action Disney remake of Snow White.  And she is beautiful, authentic, and sings with passion and power in the preview. Another somewhat newcomer David Alvarez plays Bernardo.  There is one musical veteran in the film.  Ariana DeBose who was in Hamilton . . . though, she was part of the ensemble.  DeBose is up for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. 

But this is one of Spielberg's strong suits.  He takes relative unknowns and gets the performances of a lifetime that creates an instant classic.  Based on that alone, I am giving West Side Story a very optimistic 4.5 Star Prediction.  I'm putting a lot of faith in Spielberg on this one and hoping this will not only be worth the money in the theatres, but one that I'll watch again and again and that will find a home in my personal collection.  So, am I right?  We shall see . . . .