156 min | PG-13 | December 10, 2021 | 20th Century Studios
A teenager named Tony falls for a girl named María on the wrong block in a city tearing itself apart. The Jets and the Sharks fight over pavement that the wrecking ball already condemned. Steven Spielberg waited his whole career to make a musical, and he does not waste the chance.
Two gangs fight over a few blocks of Manhattan that the city is bulldozing for Lincoln Center. The Jets are white kids whose parents were immigrants. The Sharks are Puerto Rican kids the Jets call invaders. Tony and María meet at a dance and fall for each other across that line. The film is about people clinging to turf that no longer belongs to them, and the violence that grief produces when the ground disappears under everyone.
Rachel Zegler plays María with a clarity that never tips into sweetness. She wants more than the marriage her brother arranges and she pursues it. Ansel Elgort plays Tony as a man who already knows what his temper costs and is trying to outrun it. Ariana DeBose plays Anita with a furious life force that makes “America” a debate instead of a number. Mike Faist plays Riff as a coiled kid who treats the gang as the only family he has. David Alvarez gives Bernardo a protective rage that reads as love.
Steven Spielberg directs his first musical and stages the numbers in real streets and rubble instead of soundstage abstraction. Tony Kushner rewrites the book to put the Sharks’ Spanish on equal footing with the Jets and refuses to subtitle it. Janusz Kaminski shoots through dust, water, and shattered light, and the camera moves with the dancers rather than watching them from a seat. The “Cool” number plays out on a derelict pier where one slip means the river, and the choreography uses that danger. Spielberg keeps the old songs and finds new architecture for them.
This is a restoration that argues with its source instead of bowing to it. The story stays a tragedy about young people who inherit a hatred they did not invent and cannot put down. Kushner grounds that hatred in real estate and displacement, which makes the romance feel doomed by economics and not just fate. The film moves with the confidence of a director who has nothing left to prove and made it anyway. It earns its scale.