Financial Mail and Business Day

Spielberg pays homage to timeless classic West Side Story

Tymon Smith ●

In a career spanning 50 years, 74-year-old director Steven Spielberg has made some of the biggest box-office draws in history, won three Oscars and worked in a wide variety of genres but he’s never made a musical, something he’s always desperately wanted to do, until now.

His announcement that for his next trick he would be making a new version of West Side Story, the canonical 1961 Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins directed adaptation of the 1957 Broadway smash hit, was met with incredulity and scepticism.

The original film — an urban Romeo and Juliet adaptation set against the backdrop of warring New York street gangs — won 10 Oscars and cemented itself as a touchstone of American pop culture.

Sure it had some representational problems, in particular that all of its Puerto Rican characters were predominantly played by white actors in “brown-face”, sporting thick, questionable Latino accents, but it continued to be beloved by generations of audiences for its finger-clicking Jets and Sharks gangs, lively choreography and showstopping earworms such as Maria, America, Be Cool and Gee, Officer Krupke.

The criticism of its colour blindness, which has dogged the film for 60 years, was supposedly offset by that Rita Morena, who is Puerto Rican, made history by becoming the first and only Latina to win an Oscar for best supporting actress for her role as Anita. Its creators also argued that the production was as liberal as it could be considering the time in which it was made.

While it could certainly do with a more sensitive, culturally correct update in the volatile age of the culture wars, were two old Jews like Spielberg and his longtime collaborator and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner really the men for the job?

As Kushner told the New York Times in a recent interview, when Spielberg first proposed the idea to him in 2014, the playwright went home and told his husband: “You’re not going to believe this. He’s lost his mind. He wants to do West Side Story.”

It turns out that Spielberg was right. The version that he has just premiered in the US to huge acclaim and fervent Oscar buzz is a triumph. It’s a masterclass in how to revise a problematic classic for a new, more sensitive age without sacrificing the magic and singalong popularity of its source material.

Kushner told the New York Times that he has “a profound disagreement with anyone who says that a person imagining another kind of person, another culture, is an act of violence or supremacism or appropriation. I absolutely believe that one of the great pleasures of art, and one of the great reasons that we have it, is to be able to witness leaps of empathetic imagination”. The new West Side Story is a superior example of how art can do this.

It doesn’t update the time period of its setting but rather chooses to locate it within the historical context of the destruction of the poor immigrant neighbourhoods of the West Side as part of the grandiose modernist townplanning ambitions of dictatorial and racist city planner Robert Moses who demolished these areas to make way for the swanky Lincoln Centre.

Spielberg’s camera is a vital and energetic character in itself, sweeping along with the action that now opens up the original expressionist stage settings of the 1961 version to give us a far more realistic and vibrant sense of place.

Then there is the simple corrective of ensuring that this time all the Latino characters are played by Latino actors, including impressive newcomer Rachel Zegler, whose performance as Maria adds several breaths of fresh air to the role previously made famous by brown-faced Natalie Wood. There’s also a role for now 89year-old Moreno who plays a female version of the drugstore owner played by Ned Glass in the original.

Kushner’s new dialogue gives necessary depth to the characters and ups the emotional stakes of the story. In what many purists will see as a sacrilegious move, Spielberg and Kushner, while thankfully not messing with the lyrical content of musical maverick Stephen Sondheim’s songs, take the liberty of reorganising the order in which they appear in an inspired choice that elevates the dramatic tension and firms up the narrative flow.

This West Side Story may not satisfy the most radical of cultural warriors and may enrage conservatives as a shamefully liberal attempt to placate the woke generation. To those on both extremes, this most musical averse of filmlovers can only say, “Krup you!” West Side Story 2.0 is a resounding success, a refreshing and necessary revision and a musical film that stands on its own as one of the most invigorating and singular in the genre’s recent history.

It turns out that old dogs such as Spielberg and Kushner can learn new tricks. Go and see for yourself and you just might learn some too.

West Side Story is in cinemas from December 10.

LIFE

en-za

2021-12-03T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-12-03T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://bd.pressreader.com/article/281883006623428

Arena Holdings PTY