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Steven Spielberg and playwright Tony Kushners 2021 filmWest Side Storyis a movie in conversation with its own history.
In this version, Doc, whos white, has died, and his widow Valentina is Puerto Rican.
Its a film looking back at a film looking back at a musical.
Theres such a huge space between 1957 and 2021 and its so full of things that should have happened.
Its a duet with absence.
Ask Valentina: Love will not conquer racism.
It turns Somewhere into something that is almost too cynical and too realistic to bear.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks.
Golly Moses, natcherly were punks.
They are playing dress-up, frolicking in an antic way in the empty police station.
(Theyre imitating social-worker speak when they say, Hey, Im depraved on account Im deprived!
but they still get to say it.)
He has us watch the Jets strutting around the devastated San Juan Hill neighborhood to the Prologue.
Boy, boy, crazy boy,
Stay loose, boy.
Breeze it, buzz it,
Easy does it,
Turn off the juice, boy.
The 1961 film put it after the big fight, so the two gang leaders are already dead.
But Cool boy, where you put Cool really matters.
So what did you think about them putting it where they did?
Because once the rumble happens, its true that the musical just takes off into the stratosphere.
What did you think of the new situation for I Feel Pretty?
HS:Well, I thought it was extremely clever.
Another huge shift here is obviously the gun and the focus on the gun.
It all builds up to Marias classic How many bullets are left, Chino?
speech at the end, the bathetic peak of so many high-school productions.
HS:Right, that guns the real apple of discord here.
Without the gun, its not the same story.
I think everybody has an apocryphal/secondhand/thirdhand story about a high-school production, where someone forgot the gun.
Are there enough fingers left for me?
I defy that lady sitting in front of me to sob through that.
I need to see it again to think about it more carefully.
I do, though, think the movie works together so well.
What was your first reaction?
But when its all buffed and shined and stood up together, man, it really works!
And seeing something like America done full-out just wows you.
HS:Thats not one French horn, its French horns, plural, people.
Theres so much majesty in it.
When I hear them, theres this kind of deep-woven, this-is-America string that gets played in me.
I thought, yes, this is it.
America in 2021: kings of trash mountain.
The film wants you to think about how the musical co-opts these characters stories even as it tells them.
As with the way that Rita Moreno sings Somewhere, its quite a despairing and self-critical move.
HS:Yet it also manages to say, Transit system, we love you.
JM:And go to the Cloisters!
It does feel like Tony Kushner was like, Have you guys heard of the Cloisters?
A museum full of items that have been carried around the world as part of various European imperial projects!
And yet its also a place of sublime loveliness, where Kaminski can pour in that backlight.
The thing that connects their being Polish and Puerto Rican would of course be Catholicism.
Again, Tony Kushner wants you to open up your textbooks, kids, and do some reading.
HS:[Sobs.]
