Steven Spielberg's remake of West Side Story

Introduction - Can the master of massive set design improve on the 1961 original?

Director: Steven Spielberg

Year: 2021

Official Poster

Trailer

Review

With music, it is a pointless exercise to take a famous song and remake it, unless you come up with something radically different, a fresh interpretation - Joe Cocker took The Beatles, With a Little Help from My Friends and transformed it into a soulful epic - Jimi Hendrix took Dylan's acoustic, All Along the Watchtower and transformed it into an electric pyschedelic masterpiece – The Byrds with Dylan's Mister Tambourine Man.
With West Side Story, Steven Spielberg has done something similar – His ultra slick remake seems to have improved on ... well.... everything - the set pieces, the singing, the choreography - a vivid, modified, visually stunning act of devotion. Spielberg, the master of the big stage sets, has created a movie in which Leonard Bernstein’s score and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics ring out louder and bolder.
On You Tube, there are long clips of the 1961 version - everything looks and sounds more contained though the original exuberance from the actors remains awesome.

This reviewer has a resistance to musicals, but I couldn't help but be swept along by the lushness and vitality of this film – Spielberg hasn't updated it to modern New York and isn't a shot by shot remake. What this movie does is reproduce the original New York late 50's period in brilliant colour with new digital techniques.
The original story was based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The Jets and the Sharks, have a rivalry - the Jets are white, The Sharks are their Puerto Rican enemies, set against the rubble of the Upper West Side in 1958 where broken down tenements are being smashed away to make way for the new Lincoln Center.
Ansel Elgort plays Tony, a young white man and an ex member of the Jets who falls for Puerto Rican, Maria at a local dance - a sweet natured performance from newcomer, Rachel Zegler. Both are impossibly good looking and have a genuine acting innocence and Spielberg is perfect at portraying this first rush of love with his soft focus camera. Tony lives with his landlady, Valentina, played with compassion by Rita Moreno - Anita in the original.
Tony’s best friend is Jets’ leader Riff - he wants Tony to help fight the Sharks away from the Jets' territory. The Sharks’ leader, Bernardo (David Alvarez) has a fiery relationship with his girlfriend, Anita (an exuberant, sassy Ariana DeBose) and ultra protective of his sister, Maria..It's all a recipe for some sort of disaster.
Nevertheless, the songs and orchestrations are fabulous - time has not dated their resonance - remember the big tunes - Maria, America, There's a Place for Us? Really quite unforgettable, making three chord pop music seem rather too simple. I gave my all to this poignant American fairy tale of doomed love.

The 34th Oscars ceremony was dominated by the original West Side Story - it won 10 of its 11 nominations including Best Picture - it lost adapted screenplay to Judgement at Nuremberg. If Oscar history repeats itself, the two versions of West Side Story will be the only pair of Best Picture films.
According to Oscar sources, the current West Side Story is ranking third in the best picture race behind The Power of the Dog and Belfast.
Since 1930, a total of 48 musical films have contended for Best Picture and only 10 have won.

My favourite scene Everything's free in America! - Check out the exuberance and cynicism

Number of SUBs out of 10 - 10 out of 10

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Thanks for reading my review, always up for comments and a chat about films and TV.