The Eve

                   Ansel Elgort and Rene Zegler in “West Side Story.” 20^th Century Studios photo via IMDB

Granted, there’s something very First World even bringing up the subject of movies as the refrain of Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” echoes in your brain and each day's news brings images of unfathomable courage enduring a crazed tyrant's murderous cruelty.

But readers of this blog have spent the last several months with me getting ready for moviedom’s big night, Sunday on ABC. It would be a shame to quit now, with the finish line in sight.

Unfortunately, I haven’t quite finished my to-do list where the Oscars are concerned. Despite several attempts I haven't been able to get past the first 10 minutes of “Dune,” likely winner in many of the tech categories. Big worms are all I remember from reading Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic decades ago, but whenever I try to watch it on a screen at hand, it just feels like a bunch of dark noise. “Licorice Pizza” never showed up in all the DVDs I received. I'm still hoping to squeeze Japan's “Drive My Car” – with four noms, including best picture and best director – onto my viewing schedule before Sunday's telecast.

On the plus side, I finally made it to the end of “West Side Story.” It wasn't easy. From the moment Steven Spielberg announced that he was re-filming the Broadway classic that won 10 Oscars for the movie version in 1961, I couldn't get past the question, “But why…?”

Now that I've seen it, the question remains.

Spielberg stands on the shoulders of giants – composer Leonard Bernstein, lyricist Stephen Sondheim, original choreographer/director Jerome Robbins – to put his own stamp on the production. He pays dutiful homage to the original, keeping the immortal Bernstein/Sondheim score intact, and choreographing rather than merely directing each scene. Just as the score ranges from jazz to opera, everything onscreen – from a hop in a gym to a rumble in an alley – is part of the dance.

Everything was revolutionary when “West Side Story” opened Sept. 26, 1957, at Broadway's Winter Garden Theatre. Set in an upper west side Manhattan neighborhood where tenement apartment buildings were being razed to make way for the new Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, it retold Shakespeare's “Romeo and Juliet” in modern dress.

Now the star-crossed lovers were Tony and Maria. The feuding Capulet and Montague families were replaced by street gangs – the Puerto-Rican Sharks, the Italian Jets – in a senseless, testosterone-fueled turf war for streets being bulldozed into rubble.

On Broadway, and then in the Best-Picture-winning film, “West Side Story” soared, elevating gutter grittiness into high art, turning youth's loss of innocence into a story universal, for all ages and times.

The strength of this new retelling also turns out to be its fatal flaw: It's a Steven Spielberg production. Its screen craft is state-of-the-art. The settings – the clotheslines in the alleys, the red-and-yellow taxis, the boxy green subways, the fire escapes and chainlink everywhere – evoke pitch-perfect memories for anyone lucky enough to have experienced New York's magic in the 1950s.

But in its quest for authenticity a half century later, the production gets unstuck in time. Casting all the roles from the proper ethnic groups, having the Puerto Rican characters speak Spanish, letting the performers actually sing their songs instead of having their voices dubbed adds to the political correctness, but not to the dramatic urgency “West Side Story” had in its own time. 

Despite Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler's appeal and beautiful voices as Tony and Maria, their love story never feels real. Similarly, the stylized animosities between the rival immigrant clans seems quaint in 2022, when automatic weapons and drive-by shootings have become commonplace.

The camerawork and editing are more peripatetic than the dancers, constantly distracting from the emotions in the songs by calling attention to themselves. There's only one good reason for seeing this new “West Side Story,” and that's to experience the glorious music again.

That's almost enough … but not quite. (It is worth sitting through the final credits, though, to hear Gustavo Dudamel conduct the orchestral score.) But by adding his own name to the geniuses who created the original "West Side Story," Spielberg makes this a very expensive vanity project, and a sort of spoiler in the Oscar race. 

His best director nomination was a foregone conclusion, but took the place of artists creating new art in the present moment, like “CODA's” Sian Heder. Likewise, when Ariana DeBose accepts the supporting actress prize Sunday night, it will be a way of rewarding Spielberg one more time, at the expense of any of the other more deserving performances in this category.

Speaking of the Oscars, the final forecasts have Screen Actors Guild winners Will Smith and Jessica Chastain in the lead in the best actor categories, and “CODA's” Troy Kotsur a dark horse to join DeBose in the supporting ranks. Sir Kenneth Branaugh is looking good for best original screenplay, and hopefully more prizes for his outstanding “Belfast.”

While “The Power of the Dog's” Jane Campion seems to have a lock on best director for her exquisite artistry, her film is looking a little less certain for best picture. Voting in this category involves something called preferential balloting, where voters rank their choices and the winner may be chosen by consensus.

That makes “CODA” an unexpected challenger to the longtime frontrunner.

My personal preference has swung in that direction. A win for “CODA” would be one from the heart – something we need as much of as we can get before turning our eyes back to the war and other bad news closer to home.