BEFORE: The timing really worked out here, because it's a long holiday weekend, and this is a LONG movie - 2 hours and 38 minutes. Was the original film this long? I guess it was about 5 minutes shorter, so it looks like Spielberg didn't add a lot to the remake. Or did he? I haven't really researched this.
I did work at a screening of this film, back during Oscar season - it wasn't for DGA and Academy members, though, it was just for Steven Spielberg's friends - just his New York friends, and it turns out that Steven Spielberg has a lot of NYC friends, we screened it in both theaters, almost at the same time - that's over 700 seats, and Spielberg wasn't even there! I remember getting a complaint from someone who got seated in the smaller theater, and said she was the 2nd assistant hairdresser on the film, and why should SHE be relegated to the back-up theater? Well, I could have said, "Well, you should have gotten in earlier...." but I didn't say that. I could have said, "Only the 1st assistant hairdresser gets to sit in the big theater..." but I didn't say that, I just kept quiet. Probably for the best. I don't know what I should have said, maybe something about how Spielberg has too many friends, whatever would have gotten me off the hook - always blame the famous director, right?
Corey Stoll carries over from "Driven".
THE PLOT: An adaptation of the 1957 musical which explores forbidden love and the rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks, two teenage street gangs of different ethnic backgrounds.
AFTER: I put this one off for a very long time, because I kind of knew how split I was going to be on this remake. Remakes in general kind of rub me the wrong way, because it's extremely rare for a remake to be better than the original. Reboots are one thing, but remakes? Why, we already had a movie version of "West Side Story", my mother showed it to me when I was very young - she showed me all the musicals, from "The Sound of Music" and "Fiddler on the Roof" to "The Music Man" and "The King and I". Obviously she loved them and wanted me to grow up liking them, you know what happens when you show a young boy so many musicals - that's right, he could grow up to be a film producer, so you're really playing with fire there.
It's been a few decades since I watched the 1961 "West Side Story", and since then I've watched several cast members appear on "Twin Peaks", learned that several actors and actresses have passed away, and watched a documentary about EGOT winner Rita Moreno. Oh, and in the theater where I work, there's a movie poster for the original, signed by George Chakiris - so maybe that's where my sympathies lie. But after 40 years or so, I've forgotten so much that I'm probably overdue for a re-watch, and instead I now find myself watching the remake from last year.
It wasn't easy to get here, I assure you - sure, I could have come here straight from that doc about Rita Moreno, but I didn't want to break up the Summer Doc Block. If I had ended the documentary chain with "Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It", sure, this would have made a great outro, they re-wrote the role of "Doc" from the original just to put Ms. Moreno in here, playing Doc's widow. That's probably the biggest narrative change in this story, unless I miss my guess - and they gave her the song "Somewhere", which I think was sung by Tony and Maria in the original. That might be heresy to some Broadway musical fans, but I'm OK with it. It's 60 years later now, and times have changed, and movies have to change with the times. But yeah, this was hard to link to, if I didn't get here via Corey Stoll, I'm not sure how I would have done it - maybe through Ansel Elgort, even with a gigantic cast, for the majority of the actors in this film, it's their first major role. Who told the casting director to hire so many unknowns? (Ah, the IMDB explains that they're mostly theater performers, not film actors...)
Not that much, though, this remake is still set back in the late 1950's or perhaps early 1960's, when slums on the West Side of Manhattan were being torn down in order to make space for what would become Lincoln Center. (This was all before my time, I didn't move to NYC until 1986, for college.). My wife watched this remake a few months ago, when it became available on HBO Max, and today she wondered why they didn't modernize the film, set it in 2021. Well, we still have racism, sure, but it's a different kind - I think most Americans have accepted Puerto Ricans as Americans now, so they'd have to make the Sharks Mexicans or something, and that just wouldn't really work. Besides, the fact that busloads of immigrants are being sent from Texas to New York is a recent development, that wasn't happening back in 2020 when this was filmed.
So yeah, they had to keep this set back in the 1960's, but then I realized they had to spend a LOT of money to make New York City look like it did back then. Sure, there are some parts of Brooklyn or the Bronx that probably haven't changed in 60 years, but a typical 2020 Manhattan street is going to require a lot of set dressing, classic cars, and probably post production as well to pass for a 1960's street. Much of this film was also shot in a studio in Brooklyn, and the fact that I couldn't tell when the characters were on a set and when they were on a real NYC street means that somebody did their job very well. Probably a lot of somebodys, and again, a lot of money got spent to recapture that look of 1960's tenements and crumbling buildings. It costs a lot to make a set look that bad, ironically enough.
I think a lot carried over from the 1961 version - let's face it, if somebody was able to get Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins (3 type-A personalities, I'll bet...) to work together and make something that good, you probably want to preserve and respect what they did. I think most of what Spielberg brought to the table here was blocking and framing, camera angles and such. The guy who directed action films like "Jaws", "Raiders of the Lost Art" and "E.T." is the guy who knows how to translate actions into beautiful shots. But the biggest improvement over the original is probably the singing, because here it's quite good, and not every actor can sing well. Was Natalie Wood a great singer? I'm not sure.
I remember as a kid I would listen to the song "Gee, Officer Krupke", and even then I could tell some of the actors playing the gang members were just not great singers. To be fair, it's a complicated song with some difficult key changes, and some of them just didn't get it right - go back and listen to the movie soundtrack if you don't believe me. Here, I think most of them got it right, and it is NOT an easy song - my issue is really with Bernstein not making it easy for the singers, particularly the second line of each verse, what the hell kind of key change is that? It's some diminished minor or something, just for a couple of bars - dumb it down a little, and the actors will be able to find the melody better if it's not all jumping around. "Officer Krupke", by the way, is also a very adult song for a kid to grow up listening to, since it's all about whether people are inherently good or bad, mentally sick or socially corrupt, and whether each person is responsible for their own moral compass or should blame their upbringing or society as a whole. But in a comic way, of course. And one character mentions his sister has a mustache and his brother wears a dress, which is funny when you're a kid, but means something else when you're an adult, possibly.
And there's a trans character, too - my wife confirmed that "Anybodys" was a character in the original musical, somebody born female who was dressing as a man - a tomboy who tried to become a member of the Jets gang, but couldn't get accepted by them. This wasn't very obvious in the play or the 1961 film, perhaps, but now in the 2021 remake, they were free to bring this point a little more into the spotlight, it seems maybe the world finally caught up with this character in "West Side Story" and maybe we all understand them a little better now. Maybe.
Of course, we all know this story goes back to William Shakespeare (who practically invented cross-dressing as a story device) and "Romeo and Juliet". Instead of two families feuding in Verona, Tony and Maria come from two rival races in NYC, the white Americans and the Puerto Rican Americans. Montagues, Capulets, Jets, Sharks - there's really nothing new under the sun, at least the original makers of "West Side Story" were honest about their inspiration. In Verona they had balconies, in NYC they have fire escapes - no difference, really. The only thing they really changed was the ending, and the method of the main characters' demise - SPOILER ALERT, it doesn't really work out in the end for our star-crossed lovers, but who does it really work out for? Every story eventually follows the same pattern - boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy kills girl's brother in a gang rumble. Am I right?
Maybe this story is even more relevant than before, because of all the gun violence in America. When Maria picks up the gun here at the end and points it at each member of the Jets, she's really saying that the problem is within every single person who resorts to violence to solve their problems, or every person who thinks that there's something inherently wrong with the people with differently colored skin or who speak a different language. Until everyone realizes that their hatred is part of the problem, not a reaction to the perceived problem, well, then, nothing's going to change. Or I don't know, maybe write and pass some gun control legislation, it's worth a try, isn't it?
But I still find myself on the fence, after watching the film - was it necessary? No, not really, because a remake generally isn't necessary. However, the kids today probably aren't interested in watching a movie made in 1961, so maybe it IS necessary. And then the themes of racism, gun violence and non-acceptance of free love are more relevant than ever, so on another level, it WAS necessary to make this movie again, if for no other reason than to help fight against those things and highlight those causes to the younger audience of today.
So I say - everyone should watch BOTH versions. Or do what I did, I started watching this on Friday night, after having two beers, which was probably a mistake. I fell asleep about 45 minutes into the film, which was right around when Tony and Maria kissed for the first time. I seriously wondered the next day if I should have just quit then and there, because up until that point, it's mostly a happy film - if you stop watching after 45 minutes, everybody just goes to the dance and has a good time, and Tony and Maria fall in love, and do you really need to know what happens after that? Only watch the rest of the film if you're a glutton for punishment, I guess.
Also starring Ansel Elgort (last seen in "The Goldfinch"), Rachel Zegler, Ariana DeBose (last seen in "The Prom"), David Alvarez, Rita Moreno (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It"), Brian d'Arcy James (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Mike Faist, Josh Andrés Rivera, Iris Menas, David Aviles Morales, Sebastian Serra, Ricardo A. Zayas (last seen in "Tick, Tick...Boom!"), Adriel Flete (ditto), Carlos E. Gonzalez, Ricky Ubeda, Andrei Chagas, Jacob Guzman, Kelvin Delgado, Carlos Sanchez Falu, Julius Anthony Rubio, Yurel Echezarreta, David Guzman, Sean Harrison Jones, Jess LeProtto, Patrick Higgins, Kyle Allen, John Michael Fiumara, Kevin Csolak, Kyle Coffman, Daniel Patrick Russell, Ben Cook, Harrison Coll, Garett Hawe, Myles Erlick, Julian Elia, Tanairi Sade Vazquez, Yesenia Ayala, Gabriela M. Soto, Juliette Feliciano Ortiz, Jeanette Delgado, Maria Alexis Rodriguez, Edriz E. Rosa Perez, Ilda Mason, Jennifer Florentino, Melody Marti, Ana Isabelle, Gaby Diaz, Isabella Ward, Eloise Kropp, Paloma Garcia-Lee, Leigh-Ann Esty, Lauren Leach, Brittany Pollack, Kellie Drobnick, Skye Mattox, Adriana Pierce, Jonalyn Saxer, Brianna Abruzzo, Halli Toland, Sara Esty, Talia Ryder, Maddie Ziegler (last heard in "Leap!"), Andrea Burns (last seen in "The Prince"), Mike Iveson, Jamila Velazquez, Annelise Cepero, Yassmin Alers, Jamie Harris (last seen in "A Series of Unfortunate Events"), Curtiss Cook (last seen in "Arbitrage"), Ron Stroman (last seen in "Rough Night")
RATING: 6 out of 10 paint cans
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