WEST SIDE STORY (2021) Review

Shame about the romance

When I think about Steven Spielberg’s version of West Side Story, I get irritated. It was so close to greatness. The opening sequence was brilliant, bold. The sense of a community cracking under pressure, young men and women with passions and desires and hormones ricocheting around as their world decays around them - that desperation was palpable and vivid in a way that made this film adaption feel necessary. 

The source of my irritation is Tony. Ansel Elgort LOOKS like he should be the ideal Tony. Tall, a bit dopey. Somehow though there was no sense of breathless urgency and need between Tony and Maria. 

The meeting between Tony and Maria was shot beautifully yet somehow I didn’t believe Ansel Elgort’s Tony being starstruck. I believed Rachel Zegler’s Maria because there’s an innocence and exuberance and curiosity. Elgort’s Tony looked blandly interested. 

There was no vulnerability, no goofiness, no purity in this Tony. He just wasn’t giving the level of energy, vibrancy and passion that the other characters had. To quote a friend, “he seems like he doesn’t have the life experience of loving another person.”

And that hobbles this version of West Side Story for me. I wanted to love it so much but as the story continued, I was just getting less and less invested. When Mike Faist’s tragic yet driven Riff and David Alvarez’s protective and angry Bernado died, so did a lot of my investment in the story. When Ariana Debose’s charismatic, powerful Anita got assaulted and appalled, I wanted to leave the film with her. Rachel Zegler managed to end the film strongly but I could not summon the empathy to care over the lifeless performance of Ansel Elgort. 

On Disney+