Can West Side Story Be Saved from Itself?

W hen people say they love Pirouetting Gangsters of 1957, a.k.a West Side Story, what they’re really saying is that they love a portion of it: the songs. The slate of offerings from Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim is Hall of Fame stuff — in the all-time top ten.

Two-thirds of the show, however, is the book, a.k.a the bits between the songs, and those parts are uniformly terrible — corny, campy, forced, melodramatic sludge. The show was the creation of four well-heeled gay Jews (Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins were the others) who hadn’t the slightest insight about, or interest in, the gang life that was in the tabloids at the time, and so they concocted a silly Romeo & Juliet knockoff in which dangerous men would express their rage toward one another by busting out sudden, inexplicable ballet moves. The 1961 movie version is a cringe fest. Few classic movies are so unbearable.

But we put up with a lot in order to be treated to those gorgeous songs. “Somewhere”! “Maria”! “Tonight, Tonight”! “America”! As with Carousel, another musical from the same era that has sublime songs and a ridiculous story, the show is like watching a flock of beautiful doves somehow carrying away an anvil.

Steven Spielberg’s solution to the story problem? Throw away the book and start fresh by ordering up a rewrite from the (radical leftist) playwright Tony Kushner, the guy who wrote Spielberg’s rebarbative movie Munich and the gay fantasia Angels in America. Their goal was to make the between-songs passages bearable enough so that you don’t want to pound your head on a solid object, and guess what? They succeeded. The dramatic portions of the story still aren’t good, but now they’re more or less tolerable.

As for the songs? Spectacular. Funny, merry, beautiful, full of life, and entertainingly staged by Spielberg, with his $100 million budget, on sets that recreate how the Upper West Side of Manhattan (my home for most of my life) looked before it filled up with rich white people who would spend their evenings attending shows about the plight of the ethnic minorities who used to live here.

Kushner is tuned in to how the demographics of the neighborhood were altered by bulldozer and feels a bit guilty about it. As a sort of ironic gesture to a lost neighborhood, the movie debuted at two locations that the characters dance around in the movie: 68th and Broadway (now the home of the Lincoln Square multiplex) and the parcel of land just to the west: the world’s premier performing-arts complex, Lincoln Center. This West Side Story opens with a look at a wasteland of rubble advertised as slum clearance for the soon-to-be-built campus. Physical destruction of beloved neighborhoods causes social anxiety among the locals — the Puerto Rican gangsters the Sharks and a group of white hoodlums from the Catholic lower classes called the Jets. A cop played by Corey Stoll derides them for being “the last of the can’t-make-it Caucasians.”

As is often the case with Kushner, his message is a bit muddled: Is he saying slum clearance caused gang fighting? I’m pretty sure it didn’t. Also, the “Systemic neglect drove these people into desperation” theme Kushner awkwardly attempts to bolt onto the material is at loggerheads with Sondheim’s brilliant (and conservative) lyrics for “Gee, Officer Krupke,” in which the unsentimental Jets ridicule the idea that their parents or anyone else should be blamed for their misbehavior.

On the other side of the beef, the Sharks’ leader, a boxer named Bernardo (David Alvarez), considers the upcoming rumble meant to settle all scores with the Jets and mutters something like, “It’s stupid, but we gotta do it,” which is a neat précis of the tribal mentality, and the smartest line in the movie. These men actively choose the violent life, weird as it is to watch tough guys express aggression by twirling around with their arms forming parentheses around their heads. The new choreography closely resembles the old Jerome Robbins dances, unfortunately. My suggestion for future adaptations of West Side Story: Don’t show the Jets and Sharks dancing. Leave it to the ladies. As the poet said: tough guys don’t dance.

One reason it’s hard to take any of these characters seriously is that they remain underwritten: Maria (Rachel Zegler) comes across as pretty but flimsy, dim, and lacking substance, much like her doppelgänger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She sings beautifully, but she’s too idealized to seem like a real person. She is essentially a well-groomed pet.

As for Tony, the just-returned-from-prison leader of the Jets, who is trying to stay away from gang fighting but gets pulled into a massive rumble with the Sharks, he’s played by Ansel Elgort, one of those vaguely bratty young actors who offer very little to the world besides pumped-up lips. His singing is so-so and his acting is worse than that. Spielberg fancies himself making a gritty film, using hand-held cameras and extreme closeups, but the scene where Elgort beats up Bernardo, who at least looks like he could be a boxer, is so farfetched it borders on science fiction. Ansel Elgort is the kind of guy who, in the unlikely event he ever had to take a punch, looks like he would dial 911 immediately, then call his lawyer, then his therapist. And the movie makes no attempt whatsoever to toughen up his look. This fragile flower is the one the gang relies upon to lead them through the big rumble with the Sharks? No. What this movie desperately needs is a young John Travolta to give it some grounding; as it is, it’s about as believable as Mamma Mia. The only one of the principals who really lights up the screen is Ariana DeBose as Anita, Bernardo’s girlfriend, who makes a splash whenever she is around, especially in a delightful music-video-like staging of America.

Rita Moreno, as the friendly proprietor of the drugstore where Tony works, also provides some star presence, and the movie obliges her by giving her a couple of late scenes of the kind that reliably earn Oscar nominations, 60 years after she won an Oscar for playing Anita. Are these scenes dramatically effective? Do they connect emotionally? Do they carry the nimbus of tragedy? Not particularly. But at least I wasn’t laughing.