West Side Story — The Camera Finally Dances

Spielberg waited fifty years to move a camera through a song, and the hunger shows in every frame.

The first shot tells you everything. A wrecking ball swings through a demolished block of the Upper West Side, and the camera climbs the rubble until it finds a sign announcing what is coming: Lincoln Center. Read that sign and the whole movie opens up. High culture is going to be built on the bones of the neighborhood it displaces, and every switchblade drawn over the next two and a half hours is a distraction from that fact. The kids just don’t know it yet.

That is Tony Kushner’s smartest addition to a sixty-year-old musical, and it is the reason this film plays as a reclamation instead of a remake. He makes gentrification the motor of the entire story. The Jets and the Sharks are at war over a neighborhood neither of them will be allowed to keep. Their turf feels real to them, and it has already been settled above their heads, because the true violence in this San Juan Hill does not come from gangs. It comes from city planners. You watch these boys bleed for blocks that exist mostly as craters, and the feeling is not excitement. It is grief with a beat.

And what a beat. Steven Spielberg waited his entire career to make a musical, and the wait is visible, not as hesitation but as stored-up appetite. Every number is staged with the barely contained joy of a director who has spent fifty years thinking about how to move a camera through a song and is finally allowed to do it. The peak is America. Justin Peck’s choreography lifts the number off its traditional rooftop and spills it across whole city blocks, up fire escapes, through intersections, across stoops, with Ariana DeBose’s Anita leading it like a one-woman weather system. It starts as a celebration and curdles into a fight. Anita and Bernardo debate the American Dream while their bodies contradict the debate, joy in the movement, anger in the lyric, and Spielberg shoots it like a man who understands that the best musical numbers are arguments set to music. This one insists that the dream is real and the dream is a lie at the same time, and that the people living inside it carry both truths at once. It is the finest musical sequence of the century so far. DeBose is electric in it, furious and funny and finally shattering, and you walk out of the theater still hearing her.

Janusz Kaminski, shooting for Spielberg for the umpteenth time, turns in the most romantic work of the whole partnership. The musical numbers get vintage-Technicolor glamour, theatrical pools of light, saturated fabrics, faces burning against darkness, while the dramatic scenes stay planted in real brick and rubble. His triumph is the rumble. Staged in a salt warehouse under a highway, the knife fight is lit entirely by simulated headlights and brake lights streaming through high windows, and the light intensifies as the violence does, until the room pulses with moving shadow. You never see a single car. Only the light. That is filmmaking as controlled hallucination, and it lifts the musical’s obligatory knife fight into something closer to myth. Adam Stockhausen’s production design carries the political weight the same quiet way: the Jets’ blocks already reduced to craters, the Sharks’ streets still vibrant and painted, the film’s whole case about erasure built into the set dressing, where you absorb it without ever being lectured.

The people around the center are uniformly alive. Rachel Zegler, in her debut, gives Maria a luminous directness that steps right around the role’s historical passivity. David Alvarez gives Bernardo real bodily authority; you believe the neighborhood organizes itself around his shoulders. Mike Faist’s Riff is the film’s most interesting supporting turn, a young man who can feel his own relevance evaporating as the wrecking balls close in, whose violence has less to do with hate than with the desperate need to matter to something before it disappears. And Rita Moreno, who was Anita in 1961, returns as Valentina to hand the film its conscience, singing Somewhere as a bruised lullaby that stops the movie cold in the best way.

Here is where I have to be straight with you. The soft spot sits at the exact center of all this. Ansel Elgort’s Tony is competent in a movie where everyone around him is combustible, a hole in the film shaped like a leading man, and the Tony-Maria romance inherits the fundamental thinness of the 1961 version on top of it. The film’s heart beats everywhere except where the story says it should. That costs it the last step. Nothing more, but nothing less.

It also arrives at a brutal moment, a pandemic December when audiences are not leaving the house for anything without a cape, and I hope timing does not get mistaken for a verdict, because what is on the screen is the best Hollywood musical since Cabaret, a work of staggering craft whose flaws register as minor against the sheer voltage of its execution.

What lingers is the light. Headlights through warehouse glass. DeBose backlit on a fire escape. Maria’s face in a pool of amber thrown by a bare bulb. Spielberg has always known that light is emotion made visible, and here he holds that principle for two and a half hours in service of a story about beauty that exists precisely because the thing it celebrates is already being demolished. The wrecking ball swings in the first shot and never really stops. The dancing is what people do in its shadow, and this movie understands that the dancing is not denial. It is the receipt that they were here.