A skirt-swirling, finger-clicking West Side glory!
Steven Spielberg has gone out of his way to stress that his new version of West Side Story is not a remake of the 1961 film, winner of an astonishing ten Oscars, but a re-adaptation of the original 1957 Broadway musical. He must be right – after all, he is Spielberg and he is its director – but from the moment his 2021 Jets affectionately reprise those slightly strange balletic slides along a New York sidewalk, it’s the original film that comes instantly to mind. We are most definitely under way.
And what a delight the end result is. An astonishing opening shot of the demolition of great swathes of the Upper West Side in the mid-1950s – the shrinking territory that the Jets (immigrants of European origin) and Sharks (immigrants of Puerto Rican origin) are fighting over – signals the clear scale of Spielberg’s cinematic ambition.
The choreography is breathtaking – the tense, skirt-swirling dance-off at the school gym is something you’ll want to watch again and again – and Leonard Bernstein’s score has surely never sounded better.
Most importantly of all, by making the casting of the new film ethnically appropriate (unlike the unfortunately dated original, no Puerto Rican characters are played by white actors wearing dark make-up), Spielberg can introduce a new audience to this most famous reworking of Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet. Reformed jailbird and former Jet Tony (Ansel Elgort) and the spirited Maria (newcomer Rachel Zegler) play our star-crossed lovers. Let the joy, tragedy and baiting of Officer Krupke begin.
Elgort is impressively tuneful, but it’s the supporting performances that really catch the eye – chief among them Ariana DeBose as Maria’s best friend, Anita, and Mike Faist as Jet leader Riff.
But no one stands out more than Rita Moreno, who played Anita in the original film and now, 60 years later and just turned 90, returns to play Valentina, widow of original drug-store owner Doc. But this is no sentimental token cameo – this is a meaty supporting role and has Oscar nomination written all over it. She’s fabulous.
It’s a tragedy that the great Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the show’s original lyrics, collaborated with Spielberg on the new film and who died last month aged 91, didn’t live to see its release. At awards ceremonies next year, his name – and surely those of many others involved with this wonderful project – will be cheered to the rafters.
I never really warmed to Lucille Ball or her long-running and much repeated comedy show, I Love Lucy, which was too American, too broad and horribly dated by the time I caught up with it as a critical babe in arms. But I enjoyed Being The Ricardos, which sees Aaron Sorkin – creator of The West Wing – dramatising a long-forgotten chapter of Ball’s life when, in the 1950s heyday of the great Un-American Activities witch hunt, her career was threatened with ruin when she was named as a member of the Communist Party.
Helped by wonderful hair and make-up, Nicole Kidman is excellent as Ball and receives top-level support from Javier Bardem as her husband Desi Arnaz, J.K. Simmons as co-star William Frawley and Tony Hale as her exasperated producer. Sorkin has clearly taken some dramatic liberties but the end result is hugely watchable.
Clifford The Big Red Dog is a live-action remake of the popular cartoon series based, in turn, on the books written by Norman Bridwell. Given that the central character is a raspberry-hued, elephant-sized puppy, it’s perhaps no surprise that the visual effects sometimes fail to convince, but the New York-set story is decent and there are good supporting turns from a cast that includes John Cleese, Sienna Guillory and Jack Whitehall doing a surprisingly effective job of playing American. Way to go, Jack.