It has already upset Deborah Ross, who writes in Tory fan mag, The Spectator, that: “The original brought together Leonard Bernstein (music), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics, RIP), Jerome Robbins (choreography), Ernest Lehman (screenplay) and Robert Wise (director), while this has Spielberg and a new screenplay by Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner. (Look! Another Jewish conspiracy!)”
What? WHAT? REALLY? Okay, we’ll come back to this. Because like me, now you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.
After opening with asking why anyone would want to “remake” it, she grudgingly acknowledges that this film is “more authentic” than its 1961 predecessor. That’s in part the casting she’s referring to, where the Latino characters are actually played by Latino actors – and not with darkened skin to better match the much darker faces of the white cast members playing Puerto Ricans and heavily made up.
Perhaps it’s also that Kushner’s new book makes much clearer the racism at the core of the story, the grinding poverty and the way that these communities are being pushed out to make way for gleaming new developments for the well-to-do.
The presence of Rita Moreno in the new film – she won a best supporting actress Oscar for her role as Anita in the first film (and could be up for the same gong in the spring) – as repurposed character, Valentina, is damned patronisingly as “neat”.
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| Valentina |
But, as she concludes her opening paragraph, Ms Ross feels that, “in being more so it is also peculiarly less so. Plus there is an elephant in the room. Two, actually”.
This is when she goes on to point readers to the ethnicity of the creative team/s, with the implication that that is one of the aforementioned elephants.
I’m not linking to the review – if you want to verify this, you can find it yourself, though I have the screengrabs.
“Apologies for always going back to the original ...” she notes further on in the review. But she didn’t, given that “the original” was the Broadway show and not the Robert Wise film.
Which was a missed opportunity, really, because it would have given her the chance to point out that Arthur Laurents, who wrote the original book for the original stage show, was Jewish too. And it’s a wonder too that she didn’t bother to note that he – and the majority of those mentioned above – were gay or bisexual.
One can argue that the fact of being Jewish – and gay or bisexual – actually is relevant in that it can provide the artists in question with an understanding of being an ‘outsider’ – of being ‘othered’ and even reviled; an comprehension that is clear on a number of levels in this show/film.
And nor was West Side Story the first musical that had social themes to it. Showboat, which premiered in 1927, highlighted racism too. It was created by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, from Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel. All the creative talents mentioned in this paragraph were also Jewish.
Hammerstein went on to work with Richard Rogers (Jewish), creating, among other works, South Pacific (1949), which also had themes about racism. As did The King and I (1944), by the same duo.
This is a mere skate over the subjects. But it is worth noting that, in Aspects of Wagner (1968), Bryan Magee notes of the composer’s antisemitism, that he had recognised a “Jewish renaissance” that happened a while after the ghettos had opened. And the creative arts were one area where ‘outsiders’ were freer to get on.
One could perhaps similarly say we’re seeing an LGBT+ renaissance now, for comparable reasons and particularly in the creative industries. Or think of how some sports have given black people opportunities where other vocations might still be more closed (and then there’s the inherent racism in seeing black athletes as being uniformally suitable for strength and power events)
In Spielberg and Kushner’s West Side Story, the ‘ghetto’ is the slums; the Puerto Ricans are working their way up and out of it, while the white (mostly Polish) gang members are those left behind when the more ambitious members of their parents’ generation moved up and out.
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| America, with Maria and Bernardo |
But back to (apologies) Ms Ross. “I suppose you could say that, whatever else, Spielberg has redefined West Side Story for a new generation, but the older generation? We’re allowed to be a bit grumpy about it,” she intones.
In the interest of clarity, she is apparently 49. I, on the other hand, turned 59 the day I saw the film at the weekend, so I think that I can fairly say that she’s spouting sphericals when she invokes the “older generation”.
Reading further (I did it so that you don’t have to) it seems that actually, her “elephants” are the two leads, Rachel Zegler as Maria and Ansel Elgort as Tony, who she doesn’t think are really up to it. Now, it’s absolutely fine to think that, and to write it in a review – but she should have linked it to the “elephants” comment to make clear that’s what she meant.
Further, according to the Cambridge Dictionary: “If you say there is an elephant in the room, you mean that there is an obvious problem or difficult situation that people do not want to talk about.”
Given that a number of critics have already queried the performances by the central pair – here is ‘lefty’ critic Mark Kermode casting doubt on the quality of Elgort’s performance in discussion with Simon Mayo on BBC Radio 5, so pretty mainstream as just a single example, and uploaded here the day before Ms Ross’s review went live online – it’s difficult to conclude that she’s somehow the only one who wants to mention it.
Let’s be generous and assume that this is all just sloppy writing and the Speccie doesn’t employ any actual sub editors to tidy up the dross. I can only see four other explanations, otherwise. Perhaps the real ‘elephant in the room’ is that:
• it’s intended as a dig at some sort of cohort of people who shout about ‘Jewish conspiracies’ while still loving musicals, perhaps without knowing that many of the creatives behind them are (whisper it) Jewish;
• it’s intended as a dig at ‘lefty-liberal types, who like this sort of thing, with its lefty-liberal ethos, even though they probably all hate Israel – and therefore, all Jewish people – except when liking works by lefty-liberal Jews’. Which intended meaning would be antisemitic itself anyway;
• it really is a “Jewish conspiracy”, because it wouldn’t have been made otherwise;
• it’s a straightforward, antisemitic dog whistle.
Now, I’m possibly overthinking this, but I’ve never seen anything like it in a review before. It shouldn’t be ignored.
A last little point of pedantry: “You will thrill as the overture strikes up,” she trills. Except you won’t. Because there is no overture. There is a prologue. Facts, eh?
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| Anybodys, from 1961 (left) and 2021 (right) |
But it’s not just in the UK. On the other side of The Pond, one US Twitter user, @LethalityJane, shared two tweets from users (IDs blanked out), with some facts to skewer them.
The first tweet responded to had claimed: “I will never understand Steven Spielberg’s obsession with wanting to remake West Side Story – a legit American classic – into some woke bullshit. As if the original could ever be improved on. I hope it’s a massive failure.”
Another tweet from someone else said: “As I recall West side [sic] Story never had a trans character. One more bow to the woke class not going to see it” [sic].
In the interests of showing that gammons are not the brightest, it’s a joy to report that, as Lethality Jane points out, the first film had a character called Anybodys (and think about that name), played by Susan Oakes, a ‘tomboy’ who wanted to run with the Jets.
Discussing this with The Other Half, he observed that the whole ‘tomboy’ thing is a trope where such incorrect behaviour will be corrected once the girl meets a real man and is ...
Well, indeed – straight romance as a form of conversion therapy.
There’s even a 1965 UK musical that works on this precise premise – Charlie Girl – which I saw with my parents and sister in a 1986 revival, when my father got very enthusiastic over Cyd Charisse’s legs.
The new film doesn’t say the word ‘trans’, but it doesn’t need to because more people today are more aware of what a ‘tomboy’ could really mean, which has come with a concomitant development and broadening of language usage – even for gammons.
A further note of interest is that Anybodys is based on Balthasar in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet(that play being part of the inspiration for West Side Story), who is a servant of and informant for Romeo. Now there was a writer who liked to play with gender ...
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| Maria and Tony |
As to the film itself – it’s outstanding. Not just because Kushner’s new book does add the grit and clarity to the themes that would have been harder to make so clear in the original Broadway (and Hollywood) versions. The music and lyrics of Bernstein and Sondheim shine through powerfully and the choreography from Justin Peck, which nods toward Robbins’s work, is excellent.
Of the cast, I initially had doubts about Elgort’s Tony, but once he hit the first real big note on Maria, my eyes pricked and I had goosebumps everywhere. Zegler makes an angelically pretty Maria, but a feisty one too. And there’s a sense here of the character having much more agency than previously.
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| Riff |
Ariana DeBose as Anita, David Alvarez as Bernardo (leader of the Sharks) and Mike Faist as Riff (leader of the Jets), give really top-notch performances, while Ezra Menas combines grit and vulnerability as Anybodys.
But if you don’t well up when Rita Moreno sings Somewhere, there’s probably little hope for you.
The camerawork is stunning – the haunting opening simply incredible. The whole is a thing of brooding danger and energy; at once both dark and a blaze of light. It’s been said by some to be Spielberg’s best work in two decades – personally, I think it’s one of the finest things he’s ever achieved throughout his entire career.
And if it upsets a few gammons? Well, that’s the chocolate glaze on top of the cherry on top of the icing on top of the cake.
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