West Side Story

Well well well, so here we have the dueling of two 1960s teenage youth magazine clubs for the New York slums. One is Polish and the other is Puerto Rican immigrants, all of which kind of doesn't matter because this whole patch of heaven is going to be gentrified by an excavator in a few weeks. Into the mix, reformed delinquent Tony falls for the sister of the gang boss next door, but she's promised to a timid Puerto Rican, and together they plan to disappear, while the rival clubs finally want to give each other a decisive shake with an outcome that will finally settle who's going to be the boss of the neighborhood for the few days before the city lets the place get demolished to shit. All of this is watched by a transsexual from a hiding place. If that's not too many dogs for one rabbit, I don't know what is. I guess the musical is supposed to be able to handle all of this, because all these subplots and subplots are just to motivate those dance and singing parts that we're all surely looking forward to. The reality is that while the dancing parts are truly fabulous, the singing parts are total gulag. So we the film ends up split into two completely different parts: scenes that I could play over and over again, in which impossibly statuesque immigrants jump on anything in the vicinity, fight over a gun, and rebuild a police station in incredible choreography, and scenes where the protagonists rip the proverbial singing shirts off each other in horribly stupid and pathetic duets where the words don't even fit the melodies, but they're trying so vehemently to get the biggest end notes out of the actors, and they're all in unnecessary high notes. It's a pure 5 stars vs. 1 star conflict, so the rating could be budgeted according to how much running time any given scene takes up, but the singing ones number subjectively in the hundreds, and can only be endured by trying to discover where the subconscious motivation for a blowjob is encoded there. And then there are two other contradictory elements. On the good side are the fail-safe anamorphic lenses and the properly lubricated camera crane arms of the best choreographer of them all, Janusz Kaminski. However, his obsession with opposing lights has by now reached such a level that the gunfight scene ends up with two suns shining against each other. Oh, and on the dark side is Ansel Elgort, who I think will be an excellent character actor sometime after he turns 40, when that dramatic look of his can be combined with some sharper features and a more polished delivery. At the moment, unfortunately, he has no charisma. He comes across as a nerd who knows the script backwards from memory, went to singing school six days a week for two years, ate nothing but egg yolks for six months, but doesn't really bring any personality to the film. PS: Ironically, the most sympathetic character in the film is Krupke, the cop who has to keep an eye on those bunch of over-the-top demented dudes, be their angel cop at the dance, and they make fun of him all the time, even though he clearly has a never-voiced sympathy for them. Likewise, the film uncharacteristically defends the penal system because it revolves entirely around a character who has returned after a year in juvie actually reformed and wiser than the others. You wouldn't exactly expect a film like this to side with the system. (04/01/2022) (less) (more)