West Side Story: In Pursuit of Joy
(Chase Manze)
The gymnasium doors open and you're there. A stream of Puerto Rican bodies disseminates, intermingling and finding the available space between dozens upon dozens of already-dancing pairs. The dancers all wear variations of red, pink, yellow and white. Those characters with whom we're already familiar at this point (say, twenty minutes into the film) also wear red, pink, yellow, and white. Their outfits refract light off of the imagined overhead fluorescents, turning the basketball court floors to a kaleidoscope. At first, it's about the group. The warring factions (Jets and Sharks) find comfort dancing among their own. They use movement as a means of intimidation, each side sharing knowing glances dipped in violent intent. When things come to a head and the grease-laden boys begin to shove their Spanish-speaking counterparts, a bespectacled school official comes out. The music stops. This is meant to be an innocent social gathering: a means to connect the community. A temporary truce is drawn and it all swings back to life.
Everything is happening all at once. Our leads emerge: Bernardo (David Alvarez) dancing with his Anita (Ariana DeBose) and Riff (Mike Faist) dancing with his girl Graziella (Paloma Garcia Lee). Lost within it all is Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera), a hard-working, bookish sort, completely uncomfortable in a crowd. At first he refuses to dance with his radiant date, Maria (Rachel Zegler), but as the music swells and the energy in the gym reaches a fever pitch, he sheds his jacket and begins to jive. The place erupts and his smiling face fills the frame. As he finds satisfaction on the dance floor, his date roams. Maria traipses through the currents of dips and pirouettes, her eyes gliding across the room until they find a final resting point. And there's Tony (Ansel Elgort) staring right back at her. Without a word they slowly shake off the pandemonium of the crowd and breathlessly coordinate a meeting behind the bleachers. Their exchange could've been silent and it would've conveyed the same meaning: how joyous it is to find someone, anyone, in a place like this.
What makes Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner's 2021 West Side Story revival so lovely and, at points, so magical is not the spectacle or the songs. It’s the distinct way in which Spielberg is able to capture joy on screen. Many films have captured happiness. Any actor can smile and any lighting rig can be set up in such a way as to accentuate that actor's more ebullient features. What I'm talking about here is joy: overflowing, effervescent joy that overwhelms the senses and propels both the character and the viewer forward at one-hundred miles an hour. Whether it's a colorfully-dressed pair finding their place within a grand dancing mosaic, an anxious introvert breaking out of his shell for the first time in an electric display, or two displaced souls connecting briefly, gently, out of sight behind a metal wall.
The film opens with a long crane shot lingering over bombed-out buildings and heaps of rubble stretching from 55th to 65th street on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It's quickly made clear that the neighborhood is being cleared out and demolished in order to begin construction on what is now Lincoln Center. There's a palpable sense that the tide has already turned, history has been written, and any exaggerated battles over turf are ultimately meaningless in the face of the neighborhood's imminent destruction. That shared understanding doesn't change a thing, though. The viewer is quickly introduced to the Jets (led by Riff) and the Sharks (led by Bernardo). The Jets are a rag-tag crew of impoverished second or third generation Irish/Italian immigrants. The Sharks, a newer crop of recent Puerto Rican immigrants hoping to build a better life in America.
These two sides brawl repeatedly, mucking about in the dirt and debris left over from some errant demolition. West Side Story (as always) wears its political beliefs on its sleeve. The image of impoverished youths assaulting each other as bulldozers eliminate their homes to construct luxury condos is hardly subtle. That doesn't mean its not effective. Both the Jets and the Sharks are framed as the last defenders of their community. The great tragedy comes in their decision to war against one another rather than unite against the powers that be. Spielberg shoots both crews operatically, always in the context of local storefronts, active blocks with their buildings intact, occupied stoops, and busy intersections. The community is lively, fueled in part by the Jets and the Shark's vitality.
All the initial fights between the two groups lack a clear motivation. The Jets hate the Sharks because they're Puerto Rican and represent a change in the neighborhood. The Sharks hate the Jets because they're cruel and feel they have ownership over the land. These are pretty idea-driven sources of conflict. It's only natural then that everything erupts once they're given a tangible source of tension and upset.
Tony and Maria fall in love instantaneously and over practically nothing beyond their desire for some joy in life. Their first exchange (behind the bleachers) is full of the hollow, breathless banter one might expect from two teens overwhelmed with the prospect of falling in love. Maria sighs, full of abundant yearning, her eyes never leaving Tony's face. After several moments of tense buildup she says, "You're tall." Tony replies, "I am." That's romance, baby. I find it difficult to analyze or even just characterize the dynamic between Elgort's Tony and Zegler's Maria seeing as how neither character is particularly interesting in any way, shape, or form. This issue isn't unique to this revival. To me, it's just as present in the 1961 original. Despite his partial backstory as a wayward youth, a founding member of the Jets, and a recent felon who spent a year in a state penitentiary for almost killing a rival gang member, Tony is fundamentally boring.
His infatuation with Maria is never pondered or interrogated beyond initial adolescent fixation. He obsessively assigns meaning to their budding relationship, singing about his intense love for her and the multitude of paths their lives can go down now that they have each other. Through all of this, speech and song alike, very few specifics about his love are ever given. Maria earned his undying devotion simply by existing and operating as a symbol for hope. She was an idea to fight for, yearn for, outside of the Jets. Similarly, Tony fits in with Maria's stated desire to break away from her roots and her family to become her own woman. What better way to rebel against your overbearing brother than to shack up with the tallest white guy in the gymnasium? Even in Maria's most emotionally palpable songs in the film, "Tonight" or "I Have a Love," she never has much to say about why she loves Tony beyond vague platitudes. He's an idea. An all-consuming, emotionally-overwhelming idea.
With that in mind, it's difficult to say much of anything about the two lead performances. In terms of presence, both Elgort and Zegler accomplish what they need to. They're charismatic, equally capable of resting in the center of the frame, and able to keep the audience engaged with either expression or movement. Much has been made of Elgort's performance. Naturally his participation in this film is fraught considering the allegations of sexual misconduct levied against him last year. Pushing that aside for a moment and focusing solely on the film itself, Spielberg displays a nuanced understanding of Elgort's strengths and weaknesses. Tony is a hesitant, lurking, mealy-mouthed figure currently in the process of figuring out his own identity and values. The only attributes necessary of the actor depicting him are the ability to seem unsure, to unsuccessfully convince others of ideas, and to have a gentle, bumbling romance with a young girl. With that in mind, Elgort is uniquely suited to the part. What Spielberg also acknowledges in the staging of some scenes (particularly the song, "Cool") is Elgort's abilities as a dancer. He's highly agile, able to jump from place to place, chase or flee. Lastly, while his vocal range isn't particularly expansive, Elgort's deeper, throat-y tendencies work nicely off of Ziegler's higher pitches, allowing their songs to soar in the way that they're supposed to.
Any critiques of Ziegler's Maria are to be levied exclusively at her character. Considering what she has to work with, Zegler does a superb job ushering Maria through the various emotional beats that she's forced to navigate across the film. There's a sequence late in the film where she sings a song rife with adolescent fantasy and hope ("I Feel Pretty"), then she gets some horrific news, and then has a long song back-and-forth with his brother's girlfriend Anita. Each scene calls for something wholly different: child-like enthusiasm and glee, shock and agony, pointed insistence in what she believes is right. Throughout it all, Zegler remains one of the most compelling forces in the film and a large reason why it doesn't sag heavily under the weight of its own elongated runtime. This is all without pointing to her exquisite singing voice, that allows numbers like "Pretty" and "One Hand, One Heart" to truly soar.
Much like the 1961 film, this 2021 version owes a great deal of its success to its supporting performances. Lest we forget that Rita Moreno won Best Supporting Actress for her work as Anita way back then. There's a chance for history to repeat itself here as Ariana DeBose seems poised for a major awards push. She's already seen her work celebrated via recent nominations posted by the (deeply corrupt) Golden Globes as well as the Critics Choice Awards. This wealth of praise is justified. If this is a film about energy, vitality, and joy personified, DeBose's Anita contributes so much to those efforts. You cannot help but track her every second that she's on screen, where she's center frame for five straight minutes during, "America" or floating in the background of a group scene with Maria and Bernardo.
It's not just that, in moments of joy, she's rapturous and captivating, flashing her 1000 megawatt smile and throwing out extremely sharp (yet elegant) physical gestures. Her body control is limitless as evidenced both by proper dance choreography and old-fashioned domestic blocking. Some of her most dynamic scenes as a performer come in the confines of Anita's apartment, roaming around the space, crafting concentric circles with her footsteps. She glides and gleams and perpetually delivers her line within the 6-inch "kiss or kill" zone. Additionally, more so than any other character in the film, Anita is forced to express the fullest range of human emotion: from the intense highs of pursuing the perfect life to the catastrophic lows of having it all stripped from you. It's a showy, demanding part that necessitates a great performance. DeBose gives it.
All praise for Zegler and DeBose aside, there was one performer that truly knocked me out. As a filmgoer, there's nothing more exciting than seeing a face that you have not seen before, acknowledging their presence early on, and then watching them become a movie star in real time. That was my experience with Mike Faist who plays Riff, Tony's old friend and co-leader of the Jets. Born into nothing and set on the fast track to a wholly insignificant life, Riff devotes the totality of his intelligence and endurance to the Jets, aiming to build them up to the best of his ability. Passing references are made to his past: mother's a junkie, father's a deadbeat alcoholic. Faist imbues him with the frantic, agitated, paranoid mannerisms of someone who has never known a safe home.
Faist's natural physicality serves the character well (he's six feet tall and incredibly slender) as well as his profound abilities as a dancer. While he had never appeared in a film like this before, Faist has worked extensively on Broadway, earning a Tony Award nomination for a featured role in Dear Evan Hanson back in 2017. That broadway skillset—vocal impact and physical precision—shine through here. His speaking voice as Riff is so distinct, so true to both Early Hollywood films about New York as well as the rough-and-tumble "child of European immigrants" persona so prevalent in American culture. The voice is a grating, nasal vibration that makes every sentence read like a command.
Within all of Riff's harsh attributes and physical characteristics, there is an innate fragility. He sees his neighborhood, the only place he's ever known and the only place he's experienced community, collapsing in all around him. His means of retaliation: further establishing his crew's grasp on the land. It's likely that all the land he's fighting for, everything he's going to risk, will be gone by year's end. The beauty of Faist's Riff is that he knows. Faist conveys an awareness in Riff that makes it painfully clear how much he understands the futility of his efforts. It highlights his interactions with all the Jets, Tony especially, in a new light and makes Riff's ultimate fate more tragic than it may otherwise be.
In the lead up to "the rumble," the big fight between the Jets and the Sharks, local police round up a few b-tier Jets and temporarily lock them in the precinct. The boys look at each other, assess, and proceed to fool around. The ensuing number, "Gee, Officer Krupke," follows this group of boys as they break down and satirize their experience with the criminal justice system, the social welfare system, and society at large. The song bounces from boy to boy with each either depicting a delinquent or an official. Some are judges, some are doctors, some are social workers, and some are just Jets. Each Jet gets the chance to playact a conversation with an educated, qualified adult who has control over them. Each time their explanations—"Our mothers all are junkies, our fathers all are drunks"—are roundly dismissed.
Spielberg stages the scene beautifully, capturing the boys' spastic antics in a wide lens. There's magic in seeing them all together, almost giving the illusion of improvisation. They fashion hats and judges robes out of found materials in the precinct, steal glasses for characters to wear, scatter the ground in papers, and generally luxuriate in delinquent behavior. These shots of kids being kids, of kids having a brief sliver of childhood between the years of bureaucratic abuse and agony, is at once heartbreaking and joyous. A warm feeling of camaraderie radiates throughout the scene and Spielberg makes an effort to capture the faces: smiling boys playing dress up, singing together, making a mess, and belly-laughing. That's when the movie truly sings.