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.
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.
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