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You half expect to see Indiana Jones swing in and start cracking his bullwhip in time to the beat.
West Side Storydoes feel at times like a movie to which the directors entire career has been building.
Hes unafraid, in other words, to makeWest Side Story, above all, a movie.
Spielberg and Kushner have also redistributed the songs in savvy, sometimes powerful ways.
You walk away from that earlier film thinking that reconciliation among these people might still be possible.
No such hope exists here.
But these changes arent opportunistic, or cynical.
The story quite simply makes more sense this way.
Such changes also feel necessary for another reason.
Spielberg fares better, isolating the lovers with cinematographer Janusz Kaminskis blinding gauntlets of otherworldly lens-flare.
One appreciates the effort, if not the effect.
But the actors themselves are game, each in their own way.
Elgort, by contrast, moves through the film like a porcelain aristocrat.
But there are times when his reserve kind of works.
He does in fact seem like a young man with a violent past trying to keep his cool.
Thats ameproblem, to be sure.
I suspect even the 1961 movies devotees might agree that this iteration surpasses Wises old war horse.
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