In Make Spielberg Great Again, I traced the artistic trajectory of the eponymous American populist to a fateful period when his humanistic, ecumenical worldview changed. He encountered a deceptive social force — one that altered the morality and artistic focus of the millennium. Spielberg’s own career then seemed upended by misguided egotism, not necessarily his own, but that of a faction hiding behind a facetious pretense of moral values and public trust. It caused an unfortunate derangement of Spielberg’s populist impulses, transforming them into cynical elitism disguised as sophistication and enlightenment.
The fate of the most deeply affecting and most crowd-pleasing American filmmaker since D. W. Griffith hangs in the balance with his newest release. And, yes, it is related to politics, particularly as acted out by West Side Story’s characters.
First time around, West Side Story was a musical tragedy. The Broadway stylization of American youth (created by Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim) was so empathetic toward rock ’n’ roll, juvenile delinquency, and restless urban subcultures that when the film version appeared, adults and teenagers all accepted it. They understood that art made by others could represent universal human experience. But in our millennium, the doomed romance of Polish-American Tony with Puerto Rican Maria (star-crossed lovers translated from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet) no longer embodies a common plea for age, race, and cultural tolerance. No one really believes the interracial couples that are a ubiquitous social-engineering gimmick on TV commercials today, and now Steven Spielberg’s version of West Side Story rejects what once was genuinely unifying in American popular culture. This nihilistic remake confirms contemporary America’s polarization.
Spielberg and Tony Kushner, his collaborating screenwriter, set the story in the 1960s, specifically when the Upper West Side of Manhattan was undergoing urban renewal. Slum-clearance signs announce preparation for what is now the Lincoln Center fine-arts space. That glib irony doesn’t settle the past, but it seems to wipe away nostalgia. These canny filmmakers won’t entertain the possibility of social evolution. They reengineer the balletic Overture so that it seems inevitable and almost apocalyptic when the white gang, the Jets, aggravates the Puerto Rican gang, the Sharks.
Spielberg and Kushner’s race-war conceit self-consciously heightens national antagonism; they make America’s racist past inescapable. It is always the 1960s. The threat of injustice is evident when gangs meet, dancing into their positions with the muscular masculine aggression missing from Robbins’s original choreography. The supercharged threat is Spielberg and Kushner’s way of emphasizing violent rivalry. But by film’s end, there’s no more reference to Lincoln Center and its future dominance as a bastion of Western fine arts (the wrecking balls poised over the dilapidated cityscape were just destruction motifs) because Spielberg and Kushner themselves share those commanding heights. They’re in the process of transforming — demolishing — culture according to Millennial rules that advocate classless equity.
In the original 1961 West Side Story movie, director Robert Wise knew the show was really about theater, dance, and music, so he balanced its real-world issues with romantic cinema. Studio scenes intercut with on-location shooting resulted in obvious, like-it-or-not artifice. (I didn’t like it.) But when Spielberg, a more fluent, innately cinematic artist, mixes realism with song-and-dance sequences, the result is not fake realism but wokeness. Instead of being a musical love story it’s a social-consciousness musical. Bernstein’s score is no longer irresistibly intense (his bombast was as stirring as Gershwin’s upwardly mobile Americana). Here, it’s pianissimo, not fortissimo, to make room for political cues. Spielberg cynically realizes that Millennials don’t know the show, so he and Kushner can rewrite and subvert it at will, risking little offense among viewers already accustomed to lectures on political correctness.
If that means that Spielberg and Kushner have made a West Side Story expressly for these times, it’s not necessarily a good thing. They peddle today’s worst political delusions (idiotically dividing dialogue between English- and Spanish-speaking scenes as a sop to multiculturalism) then relying on schmaltzy romanticism that no longer exists post-Madonna and post-hip-hop. They can’t access Shakespeare’s critique of children used as chattel, so they go for pessimism and mawkishness. The youth angle is unconnected to preexisting social antagonism (teenagers don’t invent racism; they learn and repeat it), thus missing how Shakespeare ingeniously intuited the suicide/genocide of misled youths that we now can identify in urban violence. It’s group annihilation (“mutual self-destruction,” a black minor character says) fed by destructive social policies of Democratic-run cities.
This is an inferior West Side Story because it isn’t an honest update. Having fallen under Kushner’s Communist, anti-American influence, Spielberg sinks to self-parody when he attempts to endear Tony (Ansel Elgort) and Maria (Rachel Zegler) as victims of a harsh society — aliens too gentle for this world. Spielberg crafts Elgort’s boyish qualities effectively, like a pubescent E.T. meeting his soul mate in Zegler, whose Bujold-like yearning also seems otherworldly. The movie peaks when Tony sings “Maria” and a little girl, hearing Tony’s entreaty, opens her tenement window. There must be a thousand Marias in the barrio — a great Spielberg touch. Then he tops it when Tony continues, standing in a puddle that reflects light around him like a halo. That rapturous image is unlike anything else in the film.
During “Tonight,” as aliens meet, the bliss diminishes. We’re shown difference rather than rapport. (Zegler warbles, in dialect, “What was yust a world is a star!”) With the operatic spell broken, we’re forced to witness the pairing of tall white male dominance over small ethnic female submission. P.C. Spielberg can’t avoid the obstacle that West Side Story was too traditional, too hetero for today’s race and gender wars. Why didn’t he remake A Chorus Line instead?
West Side Story itself exemplifies the old creeds that the progressive Left is determined to dismantle, or — if you look hard at Spielberg’s reboot — change at a fundamental level.
Revising American cultural history this way erases West Side Story’s original, unrepeatable, indisputable impact. The closing song “Somewhere” once inspired many renditions (even a poignant, if unctuous, civil-rights theme by Diana Ross and the Supremes) that felt like secular prayers for humanity. Can we ever be so open or romantic again?
Here, personal desires are expressed as frustration. “Somewhere” is reassigned to a minor figure, Rita Moreno playing the Greek-chorus character Valentina, who sings it quietly, like a self-absorbed political snowflake, her last dialogue a Kushner-crafty curse — not on “both your houses” as Shakespeare put it, but on today’s most fashionably demonized ethnic group. Spielberg shrinks the spiritual aspiration that once made his popular art transcendent. First time out, West Side Story functioned as tragedy and cultural triumph. Second time, it’s woke farce.
