4/10
It's better than this
6 September 2004
All right. I love this musical. As a long time pit rat, I have played it many times, and it is one of about ten or so that I will play any time I am asked. So why do I dislike (hate is a little too strong albeit close) this movie so much?

Well maybe it's because West Side Story isn't really a musical, but a musical is what the filmmakers produced.

The various elements involved in producing a theatrical work (music, dance, drama, etc.) are all so closely entwined in the West Side Story that I love, they really can't be separated. It's a ballet. It's a drama. It's an opera. Musical numbers appear so seamlessly that it can be hard to define exactly where they began. Musical numbers may morph into fantasy dance sequences with similar ambiguity, and it can all come back to spoken reality just as unexpectedly.

The people that made this film wanted everything clearly defined, and it has the effect of a loud belch during a dramatic soliloquy. The flow of things is constantly interrupted. The dance starts here. The next song starts here. Here's where the dramatic scene begins. It's too bad really, because a successful stage production is tricky owing to the kinds of transitions that must be made. One would think that film would be a great medium to realize the kind subtlety the material demands. Sadly, a musical (i.e. a bunch of songs in between spoken drama) is what got made.

A case in point: the song 'Somewhere'. On stage, this starts in Maria's room and goes through much before landing in a dream world where the song is sung by an offstage voice. The dream is finally consumed by the nightmare of the earlier rumble in which some important loved ones are killed. This interruption jolts them back into Maria's room where they must decide how to deal with the reality. In the movie, it is reduced to a sappy love song duet that is embarrassingly trite compared to the original ('cinematic' it always seemed to me) concept they dropped.

That's not the only example of such ham-handedness in the film, but, to me, it is the most unforgivably stupid.

This isn't to say there is nothing redeeming in the whole film. The source material is too good to lose all of its power just because a bunch of trolls laid their inept claws on it. I particularly liked Ned Glass as Doc. This movie could have been immeasurably better, though.
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