A Story of More Woe 

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• 20th Century Studios

The first image in director Steven Spielberg's new adaptation of West Side Story is rubble—construction debris as part of the "slum clearance" on the West Side of Manhattan in the late 1950s to make way for what would become Lincoln Center. Since the Romeo & Juliet-inspired plot of the 1957 stage musical famously involves an ill-fated romance—between white youth Tony (Ansel Elgort) and Puerto Rican María (Rachel Zegler)—set against a turf war between white and Puerto Rican street gangs led, respectively by Tony's best friend Riff (Mike Faist) and María's brother Bernardo (David Alvarez), it's an effective way to highlight what it is they're actually fighting over. And what they're fighting over is a neighborhood that effectively no longer exists.

It's not as though screenwriter Tony Kushner is starting from scratch in exploring the simmering racial animus at the heart of this material; the late, great Stephen Sondheim was telling us 60 years ago when he wrote "Life is all right in America / If you're all-white in America." This version of West Side Story, however, gives that notion a spike of contemporary relevance without ever destabilizing the firm foundation of the source material. Here is a tale of poor white people and poor brown people turning against one another over a shrinking, increasingly gentrified sliver of the American Dream.

If that sounds like Kushner and Spielberg are planning to deliver a lecture, that's far from the case. While Spielberg's directing aesthetic hasn't necessarily been as overtly "musical" as that of, say, Martin Scorsese, his first musical film demonstrates an instinctive sense for how to highlight Justin Peck's re-staging of Jerome Robbins' classic choreography, allowing the dance scenes to flow without frustrating over-editing. He also constructs some of the set pieces with a terrific eye to evoking their stage roots, like the construction-site setting for "Cool" or the police station in "Dear Officer Krupke" where the rambunctious Jets keep repurposing the benches for various scenarios. Spielberg's longtime cinematographer collaborator Janusz Kaminski leans perhaps a bit too heavily into lens flares, yet also delivers a color palette that evokes the Technicolor majesty of the 1961 film. Visually, it's almost always thrilling.

And the casting gives it even more of a kick. As wonderful as it is to see 1961 West Side Story cast member Rita Moreno on hand as the shopkeeper who employs Tony, the less-familiar faces really deliver the goods here. Zegler is a beautiful and beautifully-voiced María, oozing big-screen charisma. Faist makes for a memorably coiled and edgy Riff, conveying a real sense of menace. Then there's Ariana DeBose, in the role of Bernardo's girlfriend Anita that won Moreno an Oscar, who could easily match that honor; she explodes with energy during the wry exuberance of performing "America," while also nailing the scenes that require a shift of emotions captured by body language and eye movements. Indeed, the only real weak link here is Elgort, whose Tony is supposed to be recently released from prison and trying to rein in his violent side, but is never once convincing as an ex-gang member.

Still, there's emotion by the bucketsful here, and not just because this is a movie that gets to showcase soaring Leonard Bernstein/Sondheim compositions like "María," "Tonight" and "One Hand, One Heart." Kushner's script occasionally tips its hat back to Shakespeare, but more often it's subtly infused with a mournfulness about our own divisions. There's an undercurrent of tension in "I Feel Pretty" being performed by immigrants play-acting at being wealthy white people while cleaning a department store, while one Jet's ultimate acknowledgement of the gender-non-conforming Anybodys (Iris Menas) feels almost heartbreaking. In one of the more noteworthy changes from the source material, this West Side Story gives the mournful "Somewhere" to Rita Moreno's Valentina, a character whose marriage to a white man many years earlier did not portend the kind of wider-spread racial unity she might have dreamed of.

It hardly required a complete demolition and rebuilding of West Side Story to turn it into a contemporary tale about tribalism leading to destructive violence. While we're appreciating everything that has always been monumental about one of America's greatest theatrical musicals, we can also mourn how little has changed in 60 years, no matter how much we say we want love to conquer all.