Direction: Steven Spielberg
Country: USA
The celebrated director Steven Spielberg, who had never directed a musical before, takes the 1957 Broadway success West Side Story in his hands and makes it darker and unemotional when compared to Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ quintessential version from 1961. This version maintains both the music of Leonard Bernstein (here re-arranged by David Newman) and the lyrics of the recently departed Stephen Sondheim intact while adding a new choreography by Justin Peck.
With a screenplay by Spielberg’s regular collaborator Tony Kushner, the film deals with the same topics - Manhattan’s Upper West Side gang rivalry in the mid-1950s, gentrification, racial prejudice and forbidden love - while presenting a sumptuous artistic direction and some elaborate choreography. However, this 21st-century reading only delivers half of the emotion generated by the original, with the two leads - Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler - lacking the chemistry that Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood once achieved to make this story famous on the screen. Particularly interesting is the fact that the Puerto Rican-born American actress Rita Moreno, who played Anita in the 1961 version, appears here as Valentina. She also serves as an executive producer.
Visually, it’s basically the same thing, only more expensive and not so well done. Some scenes even drag while keeping that swaggering posture typical from the Broadway musicals.
Spielberg's West Side Story didn’t thrill me, and I’m still wondering why this half-hearted, unimaginative film was even made in the first place.
