This is not the plot of the latest horror film from A24 but the unfortunate tale of Steven Spielberg’s efforts to remake “West Side Story,” the movie musical about love and ethnic rivalry among New York City gangs.
A swooping opening shot in the remake shows a rubble-strewn landscape dominated by a billboard announcing “slum clearance”—to make way for a gleaming new complex called Lincoln Center.
Whatever Spielberg and Kushner may have had in mind, what they deliver with this simplistic backstory is an endorsement of incarceration: the movie makes clear that Tony came out of prison a better person than he went in.
In the new film, she has been in the city for years, caring for her father , and she expresses, in a single line, a desire to go to college.
In Spielberg’s film, Maria works at the department store Gimbels as a cleaner on the night crew, and the graceful irony of the humble bridal-shop wedding has been traded for a solemn faux union in the expressly religious setting of the Cloisters, at an altar in front of a stained-glass window.
Valentina and the late Doc are portrayed as the primordial mixed marriage of the neighborhood, and Tony lives in the basement of the store—after his release from prison, Valentina gave him both a job and a place to live.
Ansel Elgort, as Tony, has a boyish bewilderment in his eyes, and, if Spielberg were interested in Tony’s life rather than his checklist of motives, that quality could have been used to great effect.
When Tony and Maria see each other at the dance in the original, the entire gym goes out of focus, leaving them with a surrealistic kind of tunnel vision for each other.
There is no police lieutenant’s open insulting of white kids, or openly racist and threatening rant against Puerto Ricans, who respond by whistling, sardonically, “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” The ending of the original, with its restraint and simplicity, has been weighed down with extra details and grandiosity.
The story of the original “West Side Story” is that of white Jewish artists who planned to make a musical play about Jewish and Irish gangs and then, worrying that they were heading for cliché, shifted their focus to people they knew nothing about.
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