West Side Story (2021)

 This is going to be a very subjective view of the experience of this fine movie.

Death and loss. 

It’s all about death.
For me, more than ever. I was in a hospital with my dying brother weeks ago. I was asked to help him fill out a, get to know the personality of the patient, chart there. One of the questions was: “What is your favorite movie? Without hesitation my brother, who was in fact having trouble speaking, said, “West Side Story”. Of course he meant the 1960 version. He did not live to see this new version.
West Side Story feels like something always in my life. My parents saw the movie and I think they took me to it after seeing it themselves. I remember seeing it at The Palace Theater in Canton, Ohio. The most beautiful theater in Canton (Still).
The LP of the movie soundtrack was always in the house. I knew the record, the music, before I saw the movie. So the tunes of the cinema versions are embedded into me. Happy to say that these orchestrations remain in the new version. It has been some years since I watched 1960, after all it is a heartbreaking tragic story that I don’t want to feel in the mood to go into. I mean, I know what happens and none of it is good. Other than the music and dancing and moments of lovers adoring one another it is all tragic with death just around the corner of the next block. This time I couldn’t even enjoy the beauty of the love scenes because love is at least heartbreak and here multiple deaths. The love brings about the death and the heartbreak. I am writing from the deadly side of love, the side that feels like death, even a welcome death with its respite from the pain and the guarantee of no more pain and heartbreak. The place of being but no longer wanting to be unintentionally but surely the one who causes love that turns to heartbreak, and deadly pain. The immortal pain that can only die with its container. The pain of love and separation that I know will survive me as long as the others, the ones I have hurt, live. It is immortal within them until their “time”. It lives within me, in rhythm with my heartbeats.

  There is no “Place for Us”. There are only the places we and our kind inhabit temporarily until the next wave of conquerors, human of otherside sweeps through to move us on. In the 2021 movie the whole neighborhood is being leveled. Doc, and now, Vaeintina’s store setting is right at the edge of demolition and everyone in the movie is going to be made homeless, moved out, Here Comes Progress.
So maybe Somewhere is the most tragic song. It is an impossible dream home of doomed humans. 
I know there is no place for me. Too impoverished for one place, too rich and foregin for another. In the first I can feel pushed upon and out, in the second I’m part of the group, the gentrifiers, who are pushing and making things more difficult for those who actually belong here compared to the gringo’s come lately. There is a line in the movie that demanded my attention in that way:
Chino -- “Sooner or later the gringos kill everything.”
Maybe even ourselves and our winner-take-all-so-everyone-loses culture.

Within the frame of all this death there are luminous moments of incredible human beauty, the fantastic score by Leonard Bernstein matched with young Stephen Sonheim’s beautiful word emotions. 

If that is taken out to the move the whole experience would be unbearable. In this the movie is very true to life and death.
Our moments of music, dancing, poetry, stories, imagery: our moments of connection and love are all that we have, and only for a moment. We can extend that moment and live in it, in denial of the impending death, we can live with contentment.

West Side Story 2021 is a great movie. West Side Story (1960) is a great movie. They are made great by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sonhiem. If the filmmaker doesn't mess with and alter that core it is hard to fail in a production of it. 

Off hand I think I prefer much of the 1960 dancing. Certainly the opening dance of The Jets.
I think the lovers meeting at the dance in the gym are staged better, far more realistically and out of view of the others, in the Spielberg movie. 
  Having Tony sing cool was an interesting and appropriate choice over the forgettable minor character who had it in 1960. It made more sense this way and the physical battle/dance of Tony and Riff really well done.
Not convinced of Valentina given a go at Somewhere, other than drilling in that it is only a dream and there is no Somewhere.
Maria’s reprise of “Only You, you’re the only thing I see forever“ 
was an improvement over a reprise of Somewhere. Because there is not place for Tony and Maria and the only place Tony will be in in Maria’s heart memory.

Constance by Patrick McGrath

 Constance by Patrick McGrath

This is a period novel. It is an odd period. It is set in NYC in the early 1960s. Penn Station is being torn down. This fact becomes a sort of metaphor for social institutions decaying and being torn down. The enormous monumental train station that seemed so permanent, and perhaps should have been, is coming down and it is a slow painful dirty process. This is not the “swinging ‘60s” this is the prefeminist, echos of the 1950s, 1960s. And the city is changing demographically which upsets the white conservative character in the novel.

This is the story of a marriage between a twice previously married older professor/writer and a young woman, new in town and an editor.
The writer is working on a book he is calling The Coservative Heart. The novel doesn’t state the point of view of this work or anything else about it other than that the character Sidney, the British man living in New York writing it, is having a hard time with it.

He meets young Constance at a book party on Sutton Place. It is love at first sight. He wants to be with her and somehow can detect her loneliness and damage.

The story is told in two voices, there are chapters in Sidney’s voice and others in the voice of Constance.

The feel of the novel is dark gothic in the settings of her ramshackle, in disrepair, family house upstate along the Hudson River and in Sidney's enormous dark upper west side apartment. The house has been in the troubled family for a couple of generations. Constance’s grandfather built out a smaller house with ostentatious towers. She has lived there with her distant father and her younger sister who she had to mother after their mother’s early death.

There are murky dark secrets up there that had traumatized Constance and her sister and maybe her unfeeling doctor father. All these secrets are revealed in the course of the novel.
Sidney has trouble finding his way through the morass of Constance’s family mess, often seeing and taking the father’s point of view without enough information to justify that and to the added distress of Constance. Part of the gothic bind for Constance is that she is trapped between these to patriarcal older men, her elderly father and her new husband 20 some years older than she is.

It is a dark, interesting drama of family and a marriage relationship.
McGrath has a way of making an America Gothic melodrama, out of ordinary life,  that is convincing and disturbing.

 

The Winter of Our Discontent

By John Steinbeck

This final novel by the Nobel Prize winner. It was written before he got that renowned dynamite and armement award.
This is a very strange novel. It is set in smalltown Long Island, a place where whaling was once a big industry supplying oil for lamps and such. The time is contemporary to when the novel was written, 1960.
Ethan Allen Hawley is the main character. Most of the novel is written in his first person voice. The Hawley’s were once a big family in town owning a whaling ship and a lot of prime real estate. Now Ethan only has the Hawley family house and works as a clerk, an employee, in the grocery store he once owned. He works for a “wop” and Italian immigrant. He is polite but two-faced bitter. He is a family man with a wife and two teen children, a boy and a girl.
His scheme is to win, get over by appearing totally honest, to sneak up and strike when no one is looking.

The novel has a tone of a good old America Our Town and while it keeps up that tone throughout, mostly by the voice of this jacular amiable Ethan, there is a rottenness that is permeating the whole place and this Ethen character. The rotten corruption becomes more obvious as the story moves on. Ethan’s schemes include heartlessly ratting out someone and perhaps giving enough rope to his alcoholic childhood best friend.

The reader is left with a bitter taste with no characters to really pull for other than perhaps the only sketched out women. Mary, Ethan's wife, seems nice enough and perhaps wouldn’t resort to the underhanded manipulations of her husband to get ahead. She doesn’t WANT to know the business, refuses to be told, and therefore maintains a facade of ignorant innocence.
Margie the town tramp with a heart of desperation is more interesting and somewhat likable, but she is plotting too, searching for some kind of security. Yet the novel doesn’t appear to want us to stretch our empathy to the extent of actually “liking” any of these poor people trapped in corrupt decaying USA. It is as if they made it that way themselves and maybe they have since they go along with continuing to perpetrate it.

Maybe the point of the novel is to illustrate that the USA is a soft nightmare of anti-social individualist insecurity. A fitting place to get an esteemed award from a dead armaments mogul.