Review: Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” Remake Is Worse Than the Original

A rich and famous artist spends a hundred million dollars to revive a corpse with the blood of young people. The creature is still alive, but barely, and the infusion leaves it deader than when it started. 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. With the screenwriter Tony Kushner, Spielberg has attempted to fix the dubious aspects of the 1961 film, including its cavalier depiction of Puerto Rican characters and its stereotypes of a hardscrabble New York. But, instead of reconceiving the story, they’ve shored it up with flimsy new struts of sociology and psychology, along with slight dramatic rearrangements. They’ve made ill-conceived additions and misguided revisions. In the process, they’ve managed to subtract doubly from the original.

Like the first film, Spielberg’s is set around 1960 in San Juan Hill and Lincoln Square, at the time when much of the area was being demolished. 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. The ethnic tensions between the neighborhood’s white and Puerto Rican residents are rooted in a battle over their shrinking terrain. Whereas once the area was sufficient for both sides, there’s now only room for one. (There’s no hint of the fact that San Juan Hill was, in fact, a predominantly Black neighborhood.) The filmmakers’ attempt to pin down a cause for the Jets-Sharks rivalry reflects their more general shift, in the new film, toward facile psychologizing. In the original, directed by Robert Wise, the Jets are more than just defenders of white interests; they are full-service bullies who harass white kids, too. For all of its faults, the original film doesn’t rationalize aggression—or racism—away or reduce its characters to single motives.

The original Tony, for instance, wants to avoid a fight because he has a job and wants a better future than the one that seems to await his layabout friends in the Jets. There’s no single awakening that led him to want out of gang life. His decisions seem to follow the complex yet inchoate impulses of his character. By contrast, the Tony of Spielberg’s film is a convict who has spent a year in Sing Sing because of a fight in which he nearly killed another young man. He avoids the Jets because he doesn’t want to jeopardize his parole. When Riff tries to persuade him to take part in the “rumble” with the Sharks anyway, Tony explains that he’d spent his time in prison examining himself ruefully and resolving to live differently. 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.

Maria has a fuller life in New York than she did in the 1961 film. In the original, she has recently arrived from Puerto Rico for an arranged marriage to Chino. In the new film, she has been in the city for years, caring for her father (it’s hinted that he died), and she expresses, in a single line, a desire to go to college. Bernardo is now a boxer just beginning his career. Chino, an undefined presence in the original, is now in night school, studying accounting and adding-machine repair. But nothing comes of these new practical emphases; the characters have no richer inner lives, cultural substance, or range of experience than they do in the first film. Maria still has little definition beyond her relationship with Tony; she remains as much of a cipher as she was in the 1961 film.

Indeed, Spielberg’s film radically, woefully transforms the one scene in the original that conveys a sense of Maria and Tony’s family histories, and it does so with a sanctimoniousness that might have embarrassed studio filmmakers even then. In the original film, Maria works with Anita at a local bridal shop owned by a Puerto Rican woman, and Tony comes to visit her there, after hours. In a playfully comedic sequence, they use mannequins to playact meeting each other’s families, until their banter gives graceful rise to a mock marriage ceremony. 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. In another nod to the beneficial effects of his incarceration, Tony explains to Maria that he saw the Cloisters for the first time from the window of the bus that was taking him to prison.

Rita Moreno, the original movie’s Anita, has famously returned for Spielberg’s, playing the widow of Doc, the owner of the candy store and pharmacy that serves as the Jets’ hangout. More Moreno is a winning formula for any movie, but even here Spielberg relies on her presence to justify his superficial and reductive choices. 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. Now that Tony has met Maria, he tells Valentina that he wants to “be like Doc,” his role model of masculine virtue. In planning a life with Maria, he isn’t merely following the romantic dictates of his heart but also enacting a social archetype.

Both the casting and the direction of the actors in Spielberg’s film are strangely paradoxical. Natalie Wood, of course, had no business playing Maria in the original film, and her irrepressible presence couldn’t salvage the dismally narrow role. In Spielberg’s film, Maria is played by Rachel Zegler, a young actress whose mother is Colombian. Unlike Wood, whose singing voice was dubbed by that of Marni Nixon, Zegler performs her own songs, with a voice both powerful and delicate. Yet Spielberg directs her to act like a Disney princess, with oversimplified facial and vocal expressions reflecting a single unambiguous emotion at a time. 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. But Elgort is also seven years older than Zegler, and his bearing toward her is nearly avuncular. There’s no chemistry, no sense of a meeting of equals.

There wasn’t much of a spark between Wood and Richard Beymer (the original Tony), and Wise wasn’t exactly the most audaciously original of Hollywood filmmakers. But he nonetheless found some inspired work-arounds to conjure passion onscreen. For starters, the dance at the gym where Tony and Maria meet is far sexier than anything in Spielberg’s film. In Wise’s version, the very walls of the gym are hot with passion, painted a furious red, and the dancing itself, unlike that in Spielberg’s film, is blatantly erotic. 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. Then the gym darkens into a mystical night space and the music shifts, and the entire setting goes swooningly romantic with the force of their love. In the new film, their meeting is just a face-to-face behind the bleachers.

The change is emblematic of Spielberg’s failure, because it isn’t only visual imagination and fantasy that he can’t match. The best things in his version of “West Side Story”—the songs, their acerbity, the view of racial discrimination and class privilege—are already in the old one, while the best things in the old “West Side Story” are missing. 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 remake counteracts even the basic empathies of the original. It includes a particularly vigorous version of the number “Gee, Officer Krupke,” in which the Jets mock the casual diagnoses and homilies applied to them and other so-called juvenile delinquents. But the 1961 movie offers no easy answers to their troubled lives; it agrees with the song, if only by omission. Spielberg, by contrast, delivers the very kinds of diagnoses that the song is meant to mock—he himself Krupkifies the film. He leaves no loose ends, no ambiguities, no extravagances, no extremes. Instead, he enumerates topics and solutions dutifully and earnestly, creating a hermetic coherence seemingly rooted not in the positive shaping of drama but in the quest for plausible deniability in the court of critical opinion.

The story of the original “West Side Story” is that of white Jewish artists (Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and Jerome Robbins, later joined by Stephen Sondheim) 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. The result was a big stage and screen hit that has always been diminished by the blind spots of its script and its casting. Spielberg didn’t open up the story to involve new ideas and experiences, nor did he reckon with the cultural and political forces that gave rise to “West Side Story” in the first place. In a year that has also seen the release of “Tick, Tick . . . Boom,” a meta-musical about the composer and lyricist Jonathan Larson, one wonders about the meta-film of “West Side Story.” Perhaps the behind-the-scenes tale of its creation and its compromises was the audacious new musical that the moment was ripe for. Dismayingly, Spielberg didn’t have the courage or the insight to imagine it.

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of Black characters in the film.