Where does the past meet the present, and who’s in charge of moving the slide rule between the two? In the opening number of Steven Spielberg’s extraordinary version of West Side Story, the white-boy New York City street gang, the Jets—led by Riff, played by Mike Faist, an angry elfin specter turned earthling—steal a bunch of paint cans from a construction site. Their plan is to deface a public mural of the Puerto Rican flag representing their rival gang, the Sharks. In their bomber jackets and ragged T-shirts, they swing their paint cans as they half-run, half-dance through the circa-1957 city streets, already a shambles in the face of urban renewal. In the space between heartbeats, two or three of the boys leap forward from the group, only to fall back again in a minutely timed hydraulic swoon. There might be a technical term for this type of sneaker-ballet glissando, but why name it? Let’s call this arc of movement—designed by choreographer Justin Peck but obviously animated by the cool sweatshirt ghost of the show’s original choreographer, Jerome Robbins—a way of collapsing time. No one needs a West Side Story remake. So how about a West Side Story reborn?
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Like many—or at least many people vocal on social media—I was a doubter: I had no idea I needed this West Side Story until I saw it. This, possibly, is the best kind of movie, the stealth achievement that has been hiding in plain sight all along. Spielberg is one of the great filmmakers of our time, but he’s also one of our most affectionate, a designation that might turn out to be more important in the long run. His vision, and his knack for transferring it to the screen, is formidable. And while he sometimes falls prey to sentimentality, there are worse sins in the grand scheme of a career. There is perhaps no one better at working out the technical angles of creating an illusion; even in his failures, he never comes off as a lever-pusher, like Christopher Nolan, or a…
Source : time
