[7.4/10] I have high expectations when I go to see a Steven Spielberg movie. I have higher expectations when he’s adapting one of the most iconic and well-known American musicals. I have higher expectations still when people I know and trust rave about what he and his collaborators have done with this classic piece of Americana.

And Spielberg’s *West Side Story* is...quite good. He finds great performers who can sing and dance and emote with aplomb. There’s some boffo sequences that champion the movement of his performers or find the comedy amid the scruffiest of situations. The changes made do an excellent job of updating the classic without disrupting it. He’s a good director. He made a good movie. It’s what he does.

But then there’s the expectation game. I walked into it expecting to be wowed. I walked away pleased but thoroughly whelmed. It’s hard not to be a little disappointed by that.

What’s funny, though, is that it’s hard to point to anything particularly wrong with the film. The most you can say is something that’s true for the original film adaptation, and the original play, and even *Romeo and Juliet* and the other influences for each -- the young lovers are kind of boring and random.

So many of the revisions introduced by Spielberg and screenwriter tony Kushner are to flesh out parts of the characters and setting that give them more depth and resonance. But the core of the film remains Tony and Maria, and they are still a couple of teenagers who see each other once from across the room and declare their undying devotion to each other.

You don’t have to have been their age in 1961 to have grown tired of cinematic insta-love. Anchoring a story around a romance of the utmost importance that unfolds in a couple of days by two kids who have nothing in common beyond thinking the other is cute is building a house on sand. But that’s not Spielberg and Kushner’s fault; that’s just in the manual for *West Side Story*.

There’s only two things you can really slate the modern team for here. One is that Ansel Elgort feels miscast. He’s not bad necessarily (though his singing is a little off now and then). But so many of the performers the movie deploys have this irrepressible charisma and magnetic on-screen presence. In a crowd of actors who snap, crackle, and pop, Elgort has a tendency to fade into the woodwork in his simple competence, which doesn’t help the always-present but still underdeveloped young romance at the heart of the film either.

The other is that there’s an air of artificiality which permeates the film. Spielberg is a master at making the outlandish and stylistic seem real, but at times, in *West Side Story*, you can see the proverbial strings. Sometimes, that’s a feature, not a bug. Musicals are, by their very nature, at least a touch fantastical, and leaning into that is a good thing. But something about the aesthetic in particular can come off plastic and manicured despite an effort to play as hard-scrabble and imaginative, which detracts from some of the more dramatic or intimate moments in the film.
That doesn’t mean Spielberg and legendary cinematographer Janusz Kamiński are slouches here. They and an expert team of choreographers and other creatives reimagine the iconic “America” with tremendous communal flair. They find unique, self-contained stagings for the “Gee Officer Krupke” number. And the use of color and shadow catches the eye. There’s still a ton of great images to enjoy here.

Likewise, aside from Elgort, the casting here is superb. Mike Faist injects a self-immolating sadness to Riff, replete with a low-simmering affection for Tony, that makes a potentially flat character feel more well-rounded Ariana DeBose has rightfully collected plaudit after plaudit for her electric turn as Anita, with self-possessed sass out the wazoo but also a wounded heart that comes through in the right moments. And Rita Moreno hasn’t lost a step since the original, becoming the heart and soul of the piece as a new character, Valentina, who’s a reinterpretation of an old one, given new life via the script and the performance.

Best of all, Spielberg and company recognize and reinterpret *West Side Story* as a tale of corruption -- not in the sense of money changing hands amid the venal -- but in the sense of poverty and tribal strife grinding up beautiful, hopeful things under the wheels of progress. The turf our heroes are fighting over is soon to be demolished anyway, making the war for a diminishing slice of the pie seem even more futile. The real enemies of the piece are unseen and out of reach, driving home the senselessness of why the Jets and the Sharks choose to turn on one another.

In the process, Riff’s near-death-wish and Bernado’s prize fighting dreams blend together in one pointless, accidental gesture that wreaks havoc in the shadow of impending destruction. It turns Anita’s belief in the American dream into a curdled resentment for the cruelty her countrymen are capable of. It takes away Chino’s bright future apart from such sectarian violence and turns him into a vengeful killer. It pulls Tony back into the muck he’d tried so hard to move on from, reducing his second chance at a better life to ash. And it transforms Maria’s hope and belief that there’s no reason someone from her neighborhood shouldn’t fall in love with someone from his into a burning hatred.

In brief, Spielberg’s rendition of *West Side Story* isn’t a simple romantic tragedy or even a story of racial strife brought to the doorstep in bloody terms. It is a story of hope and optimism filed down to a piercing point, the bright and idealistic crushed amid so much rubble from wrecking balls which exist high above such personal dramas and losses. There’s added nuance that makes the tale salient again sixty-five years after the musical’s debut.

And still, I walked in expecting something extraordinary and found something that is, merely, very good. There’s no shame in that. Maybe it’s simply a combination of overfamiliarity and consistent quality to the point of raised expectations. Leonard Bernstein’s music and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics are as good as ever, but are practically burned into the American psyche by now. Spielberg’s skills as a filmmaker are so polished and perfected by now that they seem effortless. At some point, the known good doesn’t seem good enough anymore for whatever reason. *West Side Story* finds novel new spins on the familiar and deploys them well, but like two teenagers fawning over one another as though it’s true love, doesn’t quite live up to the hype.