Critics reviews

With the screenwriter Tony Kushner, Spielberg has attempted to fix the dubious aspects of the 1961 film, including its cavalier depiction of Puerto Rican characters and its stereotypes of a hardscrabble New York. But, instead of reconceiving the story, they’ve shored it up with flimsy new struts of sociology and psychology, along with slight dramatic rearrangements. They’ve made ill-conceived additions and misguided revisions. In the process, they’ve managed to subtract doubly from the original.

There’s a reason “West Side Story” is a staple of the performing arts curriculum, and for all the Hollywood bells and whistles, the essence of Spielberg’s version is a bunch of kids snapping their fingers and singing their hearts out.

It doesn’t take much for “West Side Story’s” themes — immigration, racial anxiety, abuse of police power, the casual dehumanization of the Other — to feel of-the-moment. But Kushner makes subtle work of making sure they resonate... Despite their crystal-clear relevance, none of these feel like soapbox speeches in a film whose greatest achievement might be its surpassing gracefulness, whether in the form of the performances, Kushner’s pointed but never polemical writing, or Janusz Kaminski’s extraordinary cinematography, which travels with swooping abandon through New York’s city streets, gives the dance numbers plenty of time to unfurl and, at one point, turns a rain puddle into a magical, even sacred space.

The strength of Spielberg and Kushner’s reimagining—in addition to the simple, overpowering beauty of its music, lyrics, and dance—is that it finds a new way to pose the question of who might be included in the “us” of this venerable cultural institution, and how and where they can now begin finding their place.

Although Spielberg cleverly restages many of the film’s major musical sequences... there’s something flat about the result. In between sequences, Elgort seems awkward and wooden; if West Side Story was simply singing and dancing, it might be a masterpiece, but it’s when everyone gets to talking that there’s an inherent staleness.

Spielberg knows better than to reinvent the show. His West Side Story boasts no new songs and only a couple small tweaks to the blueprint of its mythic romance... Yet Spielberg grabs us immediately; even if you’ve memorized West Side Story, you’ve never seen it through his eyes.

The whole film feels as contemporary as it needs to, since topicality is baked into its tribal dance of racial animosity. “West Side Story” is a bursting, live-wire pageant of a movie. I just wish it had a final act that soared instead of lumbering to what feels like an overly determined message-movie landing.

The new West Side Story won’t take the place of the glorious 1961 screen version, co-directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, whose dances remain untouchable. But with its more inclusive, ethnically appropriate and youthful casting, this is an emotionally charged and deeply affecting retelling of a timeless tale for a new generation.

This new West Side Story isn’t updated historically yet neither is it a shot-for-shot remake. But daringly, and maybe almost defiantly, it reproduces the original period ambience with stunning digital fabrications of late-50s New York whose authentic detail co-exists with an unashamed theatricality.

Spielberg’s movie may be rougher, grittier, more lived-in and, in terms of cultural representation, more truthful than its 1961 cinematic incarnation. But it is also more unabashedly classical, more radiantly stylized, than just about anything a major American studio has released in years. That includes some of Spielberg’s own movies.

He [Spielberg] keeps the expressionist colours and bold shapes of the ’61 film but opens out the stage to the real world, mixing showy shots, like the stretching shadows of the Jets and Sharks meeting on a battlefield, and lived-in communities, like the giant street party that is ‘America’, without losing sight of the emotion.

West Side Story is, I believe, Spielberg’s finest film in 20 years, and a new milestone in the career of one of our greatest living directors... he has delivered a relentlessly dazzling, swoonily beautiful reworking of the 1957 Manhattan-set musical by Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, which feels just as definitive and indestructible as the previous screen adaptation, directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins.