West Side Story (Steven Spielberg, 2021)

For the first ten or so minutes, Steven Spielberg's West Side Story remake feels like a tomb opened up for the reanimated corpse of Robert Wise's 1961 film adaptation to pirouette onto 2021 screens. You ask yourself, "why this again? why now?" Soon, though, I was sucked in by the incomparable score. And by the time Tony (an underrated Ansel Elgort) lets forth with "Maria," I was blubbering. Spielberg injects some jokey moments into the number such as neighbors slamming their windows shut. But the man means no disrespect to the genre as evinced by the irresistible shot in which Tony looks heavenward while a pool of lights reflected in pissy street ponds twinkle around him, quite possibly the loveliest moment in Spielberg's oeuvre. Thanks to Spielberg's commitment, I now hear "Maria" as an apotheosis of American musical theatre and wonder if Stephen Sondheim ever composed a couplet as divine as "Say it loud and there's music playing/Say it soft as it's almost like praying."

And so it goes. Rachel Zegler as Maria, Ariana DeBose as Anita, David Alvarez as Bernardo, Mike Faist as Riff, and, yes Elgort all acquit themselves admirably and then some. The mambo at the dance gave me the chills (but then again, it always does). "Tonight" is performed largely through an illegally locked fire escape grate. Tony tells Maria that she should get the landlord to fix that, a specific more heart-warmingly New Yawk than an opened-out "America" featuring a protest against Robert Moses. "Cool" makes more sense here as a rift between Tony and Riff rather than as a time killer in the 1961 film. And giving "Somewhere" to Valentina, the new character to replace/beef up the role of Doc, is a stroke performed by Rita Moreno as a more generalized plea for transcendence. My heart was heavy. The 156 minutes whizz by. I loved it.

But...what does it all mean? Now that we know what a West Side Story film would be like with actual Latin actors in the roles of Maria and Bernardo (and an Anita with no brown face), what's next? Does this augur a Hollywood with not only more work for Zegler, DeBose, and Alvarez, but more culturally specific stories as well? Anbodys is now a trans guy (played by non-binary actor Iris Menes) who protests the Jets' marking him as female. When he wins them over by informing them that Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera) has a gun and is looking to shoot Tony, one of the Jets praises him with a preposterous "You've done good, buddy boy." Even though I found this as groan-inducing as any of Tarantino's historical revisions, I applaud this moment of acceptance if it makes a trans viewer feel mighty real. But as Peggy Lee (and Cristina) once asked, is that all there is? A sprinkling of Representation Matters into a proven property?

Judging from the premature obituaries for the film's "underperformance" at the box office, that apparently is all there is, at least at the tentpole level. But there are (coughs) alternatives. I saw West Side Story after spending a weekend with two hideous, offensive films - Single All the Way and The Bitch Who Stole Christmas, the former Netflix's go at a gay Hallmark Christmas movie, the latter a feature-length version of one of those DOA musical numbers on RuPaul's Drag Race. Both function as what Kristen Warner calls "plastic representation" - a box-checking quantifiable difference that "overdetermines the benchmarks of progress and obscures the multifaceted challenges inherent in booking roles as well as securing work on writing staffs, directing gigs, or even reaching executive gatekeeper status—thus privileging the visible (actors) over all other cinematic and televisual functions." If Single All the Way and The Bitch Who Stole Christmas are "gay films," I'll stick with my "perverse" and "naive" readings of the queerness in select Joan Crawford and Franklin Pangborn titles. But I left West Side Story with plasticity on the mind. Is it a trans film now or even a Latin one? Could it ever be?

 Grade: A-minus