West Side Story (2021) Parent Guide

Maria (Rachel Zegler) is full of hope. Bright-eyed, and beautiful, the 18-year-old Puerto Rican girl has moved to New York City to live with her brother, Bernardo (David Alvarez), leader of the Sharks gang. She cleans department stores at night but dreams of going to college and building a future.

Tony (Ansel Elgort) is determined to turn over a new leaf. Once leader of the Jets gang, the Polish-American man spent a year in prison after he almost killed someone in a fight. Twelve months of serious self-assessment put Tony on a new path, working at a drugstore and focused on staying clean.

When Maria and Tony lock eyes across a crowded community dance hall, they fulfil every romance trope by falling instantly in love. A dreamy dance and passionate kiss behind the bleachers follow; then an unwelcome interruption from Maria’s brother. Bernardo not only objects to his sister socializing with “gringos”; he is particularly opposed to Tony because of his connection to the Jets. The gangs are planning a rumble and with Maria in the picture, the fight is now personal.

Tony and Maria find themselves falling ever more deeply in love and are determined to end the cycle of violence that is consuming their community. But as the tale of Romeo and Juliet demonstrated 600 years ago, ending a feud is harder than it sounds….

Steven Spielberg is in top form with this adaptation, producing a film that is so energetic, so spirited, and so kinetic, that it practically leaps off the screen. The dance sequences are physical, athletic, and swirling with color and life. While many Broadway hits struggle to escape their origins on the stage, this version easily soars beyond those constraints, pushing at the boundaries of the theater screen. The cinematography brings a gripping immediacy to the scenes and the sound design is crystal clear, making footfalls, sighs, and the clink of a chain audible and unavoidably significant.

On top of the technical skill and the award-winning soundtrack, this movie has a superb cast. Rachel Zegler, a virtual novice who beat out 30,000 actresses in auditions for the role, brings luminous innocence and huge Bambi eyes to her critically important portrayal as Maria. Ansel Elgort gives us a Tony with hard-earned innocence, believing that if he can change, so can others. And Ariana DeBose owns every scene she appears in as Anita, Bernardo’s girlfriend. Not only is she a powerful dancer, but she has a ferocious love of life that is palpable whenever she’s on the screen. There is a real danger that she can steal this movie from the principal actors. In a tip of the hat to the 1961 movie adaptation, Rita Moreno, who played Anita, now appears as Valentina, the drug store owner who is helping Tony reform. It’s a touching tribute to Moreno’s career and a nod to her fans.

The entertainment also comes with some heavyweight topics. The neighborhood in which the characters live is slated for demolition, their tenements and walk up apartments to be replaced with high rent properties. In a bitter irony, the gangs are fighting over territory that will soon be gone. The movie explores issues of gang affiliation and violence, gentrification, racism, and anti-immigrant hostility which make this classic story sharply relevant in 2021.

Positives aside, West Side Story comes with some problems. The first is minor but viewers should know that there are multiple lines in Spanish that are not subtitled. My two years of junior high Spanish were not up to the challenge, and I spent those scenes trying to figure out what was going on. The next problem is the whole fall-in-love-at-first-sight thing. Call me a cold-hearted critic, but I simply don’t believe in it, and feeding that myth to teens is potentially dangerous. Encouraging adolescents to believe that they should turn their lives upside down because they feel a powerful attraction to someone is incredibly bad advice. (And sleeping with someone you’ve only known for a couple of days – without contraception – is not behavior anyone wants teens to emulate.) The biggest problem though, is the violence, including a chilling scene where a group of men attempt to rape a woman. More commonly, there are frequent fights in the movie – someone gets a nail through his ear, two men get stabbed, and one gets shot. All the fight scenes are filmed in detail, as elaborately choreographed as any ballet. While the violence is shown to be pointless, destructive, and tragic, it still gets lots and lots of bloody screen time. As Shakespeare, whose work clearly inspired this film, said, “These violent delights have violent ends.” Whether or not you think the film’s many delights are worth the violence is going to be a personal decision.