Steven Spielberg’s refreshing new take on the classic musical was a jubilantly sugary delight that whisked you back to the 50sBest films of 2021: the complete listMore on the best culture of 2021Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story 2.0 is an ecstatic act of ancestor-worship. It’s a vividly dreamed, cunningly modified and visually staggering revival. No one but Spielberg could have pulled it off, creating a movie in which Leonard Bernstein’s score and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics blaze out with fierce new clarity. Spielberg retains María’s narcissistic I Feel Pretty, transplanted from the bridal workshop to a fancy department store where she’s working as a cleaner. This was the number whose Cowardian skittishness Sondheim himself had second thoughts about. But its confection is entirely palatable.
Spielberg has worked with screenwriter Tony Kushner to change the original book by Arthur Laurents, tilting the emphases and giving new stretches of unsubtitled Spanish dialogue, and keeping much of the visual idiom of Jerome Robbins’s stylised choreography. This new West Side Story isn’t updated historically yet neither is it a shot-for-shot remake. But daringly, maybe defiantly, it reproduces the original period ambience with stunning digital fabrications of late-50s
New York whose authentic detail co-exists with an unashamed theatricality. On the big screen the effect is hyperreal, as if you have somehow hallucinated your way back more than 60 years – to both the musical stage for the Broadway opening night and also the city streets outside.