Yes, a flawed classic that we've become blind to. Robert Wise's 1961 version is beautiful to look at, technically stunning, the dancing is amazing, the music is always good, and Natalie Wood's gorgeous. And Rita Moreno. And Rita Moreno.
But, everybody's too old. Too clean. It feels like play-acting (certainly play-fighting). The Sharks are, for the most part, white guys in tan make-up, as is Russian Natalie Wood's Maria. And no one believes Richard Beymer for a second. Handsome guy, sure. But not for a second. Then, the story-line has always had issues, particularly in its hysterical third act. It did on stage, and even trying to correct it in the movie didn't work.
So, yeah, it needed to be done. And Steven Spielberg (who loved the original) has been wanting to re-makeWest Side Storysince he was sixteen. Sometimes, when you hear a factoid like that, it's a case of being careful what you wish for. A Spielberg version of it would (one would think) at least be an interesting amalgamation of his youthful ideals with his more mature film-making stance of late, the "Gee-Whiz" Kid meets the Craftsman.*
So, how is it? Glorious. And calculated. If you're worried about the emotional "chill factor," the story and the music and the songs still punch you in the heart in the same way when you were an impressionable teenager and would cry over the punctuation of a love note (not enough "!!"'s) or the tragedy of "Romeo and Juliet" (do we really have to explain the piece's origins?). But, it's a different, less vacant world than the one of the '61 version. People look out the window and look at you crazy if you're singing by yourself in the middle of an alley-way. It's a cluttered, messier world and people talk over each other and speak Spanish in emotional dudgeon before being scolded to "speak English!"
It's messier and transitioning. New York's inner city looks like a war zone (It is). Gentrification is going on with blocks being demolished for an in-coming "Lincoln Center." The film starts with an overhead shot of rubble—including (grim foreshadowing smile here) fallen fire-escapes. Then, a Jet pops through a roof-door and the gang starts skipping down the street (not in Jerome Robbins-tight choreography) carrying paint cans. Kicking over a "Man Working" sign, it's apparent they're on a mission, but first they have to leave a slum area in decay to a busy slum area where the people haven't given up yet.
It's smart, less random, and in its own way, sets the precedent for the whole strutting-dancing-fighting correlation that needs to be crossed for "West Side Story" to work. It ends up in a brawl, but no one is high-kicking each other, the punches crunch, one kid gets a nail through an ear-lobe, and there is blood.** The point is made. This is going to be a tougher "West Side Story" with resentments about things other than turf. At one point, Jets leader Riff (a very good, very weasly Mike Faist) says "Ya know, I wake up to everything I know being sold or wrecked or being taken over by people I don't like" (just in case anybody accuses the movie of not being "relevant") and they're pegged by a New York city cop (Corey Stoll) as being just "slum clearance."
That's the milieu; how are the leads? Reviews I've scanned have problems with both of them, but I think that's wrong. For me, the biggest problem of "West Side Story" was always Tony. You're not sure what his motivation is, other than not to be part of the gang—while being part of the gang. Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner have beefed up the character by giving him additional back-story. Here, Tony is just trying to stay straight: he's been in prison for a year for nearly killing a kid in a past rumble, sort of like John Wayne's Sean Thornton in The Quiet Man—he's haunted by his past actions—and now, he's out on probation, keeping his nose-clean, and working for Valentina (Rita Morena) running Doc's drug store in the old neighborhood. Tony is played here by Ansel Elgort, who's done great work in The Fault in Our Stars and Baby Driver. Elgort can dance, although he doesn't do much of it here, and he has a fine singing voice and isn't shy about hitting the high notes—if I have a complaint about him it's that he seems to be concentrating on the technical side of the singing rather than the acting. But, his Tony is interesting, the guy everybody looks up to (because he's a head taller than everybody) and he only gets MORE interesting once he meets Maria at the dance.
At first—the way Spielberg stages it—she's just someone he sees out of the corner of his eye dancing with another guy, enjoying herself (it's her first dance of the night). Then, he walks the outside of the dance floor, stalking, riveted, and it's almost like that attention is what makes Maria notice him. And from that moment on, he's like Brando's Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront—completely gob-smacked, struck stupid by "the thunderbolt" to the point where he'll do anything—anything—for her. And that previous internal conflict just goes away. "All my life, it's like I'm always just about to fall off the edge of the
world's tallest building. I stopped falling the second I saw you." So, she's gotta be something special.
And Rachel Zegler is. There's something preternaturally attractive about her and not in any traditional way. Her eyes are Disney Princess-huge—of COURSE, they've cast her in the live-action Snow White—sunk deep in her skull and they cut across her entire face. She's doll-like, unnatural, but in the way that sinks into the alligator cortex, turns into goo, and makes you want to buy a puppy. And Maria, the character, is a tough sell, with fast emotional transitions and, if done wrong, can seem like the architect of such chaos that one has no sympathy for her, not even at the end. Some wickedly tough songs, too. Fortunately, Zegler is up to the task, and Kushner has given her far more spine than previous versions. You want these kids to work it out and get out of this dump.
Spielberg takes advantage of every moment—and sometimes just beats of music—to tell his story. There is sure to be some grousing about musical choices and positionings, particularly how the song "Cool" is used—it's moved in transitions from stage to screen to screen, and here it's Tony's number (which, given his role as thwarted peacemaker, works)—and there is one song that I was horrified when it started to come up in the position that it did, but it gives a needed distraction after the big rumble, and raises emotional goal-posts setting up a particularly savage transition for Maria's character to make.
And some may disagree how the work's most famous piece, "Somewhere," is used—and who it's given to—but the choice is an apt one, making its meaning more ethereal and more universal. Emotionally it feels right.
And the big show-pieces are wonders. The show-stopper is always "America" ("I like the island Manhattan/Smoke on your pipe/and put THAT in") and Spielberg opens it up in keeping with maintaining as much location work as possible. I've made no mention of David Alvarez as Bernardo, the boxing leader of The Sharks or his girl Anita, who is played by Ariana DeBose, and that oversight may be criminal. The two are meant to be more flashy than Maria and Tony and they are the life of the party, all flash and dash, smirk and flirt. Their spontaneity can't be contained, so instead of staging the number on a limited rooftop, it moves from back-alleys to city-streets, whirling and sashaying and running at full gallop until not only the show stops but New York traffic as well. The exuberance is contagious, but freer and feels more risky, more dangerous, more alive.
Why re-make it, you ask? (I dunno. Why remake "Romeo and Juliet?") Because with new interpretations come improvements—or not. It's the chance one takes with producing art. They're not going to stop re-staging it in theaters, nor should they. But, if one must cling to the original, there's always what author James M. Cainsaid when an associate (John Leonard) criticized a film-version of a novel of his: "They haven't done anything to my books" (pointing to his study) "They're still there on the shelf. They paid me and that's the end of it. They're fine." The original is still there—I have it on DVD—and naysayers can watch it anytime they want. I prefer this version, and I'll prefer it...until a better version comes along.
* Robert Wise, when he made West Side Story, had been making films for 17 years. Spielberg has been making them for 47 years. Hmm.
** Later, Spielberg will have a fight where he borrows a few set-ups from a brawl in A Clockwork Orange. He's not kidding around.
“I guess the question I'm asked the most often is: "When you were sitting in that capsule listening to the count-down, how did you feel?" Well, the answer to that one is easy. I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of two million parts -- all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.”
Astronaut John Glenn
The Man in the Glass Booth
or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
I read James R. Hanson's biography of astronaut Neil Armstrong, "First Man" some months ago—I'd always been fascinated by the American Space Program of the 1960's when I was a kid—and I found the book a tedious slog. Despite my interest, it tested my ability to be fascinated by Armstrong's career, going into such extreme depth as listing Armstrong's scores during military flight training in the 1960's and the grind of astronaut training...as well as the author's fervently pushed sub-text that Armstrong was a mythical figure on a par with Adam. Plus, Armstrong was such a tight-lipped, interior soul that one got the impression that, despite the scrutiny and coverage of his career before and after the first moon landing, the man was pretty much a cipher, so unknowable that the author depended on other people's impressions to such a large extent that one never really got the sense that you knew the man, and certainly never warmed to him. The flaws were the most interesting things about him: he was an ace test-pilot but a horrible driver, seemingly never able to concentrate on the road, he had a stoicism that kept him apart from those he loved—his grueling schedule usually ensured that, anyway—and he was an innate problem-solver, which did him well at his job of controlling machines, but, on a human level, stymied him, particularly in the challenge of death—of Navy comrades, his only daughter Karen,***and fellow astronauts (particularly Ed White, his next-door neighbor) killed in the process of the head-long rush to achieve the Moon landing within a ten year time-span.
With Armstrong's death in 2012, it was probably inevitable that they would make a film of Armstrong's life.*First Man encapsulates (pun intended) the intense period of Armstrong's life between the tail-end of his time testing X-15 rocket-planes to the moon landing of Apollo 11, a period of 8 years.**It begins with a disorienting shot looking out through grimy windows from the cockpit of an X-15. The camera buffets wildly. The noise is deafening, from the wind-shear, the clacking instruments, the creaking strains on the metal exterior, the rattling of anything not bolted down in the little compartment, the squawking chatter of the radio. Everything except the rattling of the pilot's teeth. That X-15 is strapped to the underside of a B-52 and it will be dropped like a bomb, and, once it's fallen far enough to safely do so without blowing up its host-plane, the pilot will light up its rocket engines and take the X to its limits (which turned out to be a height of 67 miles and a maximum speed of 4,520 miles per hour). That plummeting drop might be the calmest part of the ride, because once the engines kick in, the X-15 is a shaking, vibrating brick that gets red hot in the friction of the atmosphere. Now the film is in 3-D (I didn't see it in that format or in IMAX), but, if it was also presented in Sensurround it would be intolerable. Damned effective in communicating what it's like in that circumstance, but probably beyond what a casual viewer munching popcorn could handle. It's a neat primer on what First Man does differently in the depiction of space travel that separates it from previous films on the subject in regards to the actual experience of the pioneers doing it.
For First Man, like its subject, is not exactly romantic when it comes to the Conquest of Space, but is, instead, realistic and practical. While most films look at the tiny vessels contrasted with the vastness of the space they're pushing through, First Man keeps you in the cockpit, from the vantage point of the sailors strapped in for dear life, who are warily watching the attitude indicators of their control panels as opposed to dreamily gazing at the stars out the window. Zero G is not something to be luxuriated in, it's a problem to be worked around, so that a stray foot doesn't hit the wrong toggle-switch and the floating clutter doesn't get in the way of the job.
Armstrong might have been the perfect candidate for the job. He loved flying and he loved the problem-solving of the task, trying to get it "just so" in the engineering from the time he had his siblings throwing out balsa wood airplanes from his window, so he could mark with popsicle sticks stuck in the yard the differences his adjustment would make in their aerodynamics. When the film starts in medias res of that X-15 flight, Armstrong goes too high and too fast, so that he ends up "skipping off the atmosphere" and has to find a radical way to use his attitude jets to give him enough drag to get the X-15 back to the ground. He makes it, but glances are passed between the ground crew: Armstrong's flights have been shaky lately; something's going on.
I see the moon, the moon sees me shining through the leaves of the old oak tree Oh, let the light that shines on me shine on the one I love.
What's going on is shown in the next scene as a large menacing piece of chrome lowers to the head of a little girl; it is the Armstrong's daughter, Karen, and the worrying parents, Neil (Ryan Gosling) and Janet (Claire Foy), watch, their arms around each other, stricken—the child is being treated for a brain tumor, and, as we'll see, Armstrong keeps notebooks on her treatment, just as he does after his X-15 flights, but it's not going well. And over a shot of Armstrong watching over his sleeping daughter, as his fingers consider the strands of her hair, we hear a deliberate creaking of rope...
...it is the sound of her coffin being lowered into the ground, as Armstrong watches hollow-eyed. There will be flash-backs to the shot of her hair in his hands, the tactile sensation of his daughter later in the movie, but Armstrong, rarely—if ever—mentioned his daughter's death—at 2 1/2 years old—in the many interviews that he actually would allow. One can speculate, as Hanson, "writing to silence"****in the biography, did, that his daughter's death informed the course of Armstrong's actions for the rest of his life and probably played a hand in his becoming a "deist," after having been raised by the devoutest of mothers. But, Armstrong's life was a full one and, no matter how artfully done in the book or movie, it probably can't be thinned down to making his daughter Karen the "Rosebud" of the movie, the Rosetta Stone that has all the answers.
After these scenes, the film then turns episodic—as so many bio-pics do—between highlights and low-lights in Armstrong's astronaut career: his applying for NASA and acceptance (during his interview when he's being questioned, one of the NASA hierarchy starts "I'm sorry about your daughter." and Armstrong's reply is "I'm sorry, is there a question?"), some training footage (which will become pertinent later), the deaths of fellow astronauts Elliot See and Charlie Bassett, and Armstrong's pick as commander of Gemini 8, which would prove an essential stepping-stone to the Apollo moon landing; It's mission is to rendezvous and dock with a previously launched Agena target, which Armstrong pulls off smoothly until he's out of communication with Mission Control, at which point the two locked vehicles begin to spin wildly out of control, and Armstrong makes the decision to separate from the target vehicle thinking that it has malfunctioned.
Once that happens, the capsule begins to spin faster—it wasn't a fault with the Agena, it is with their own capsule, and as it begins to spin faster and faster, approaching speeds that will cause the astronauts to black out, Armstrong shuts down his main thruster systems on the ship, suspecting them as the problem, and uses the forward thrusters for re-entry to bring the vehicle out of its death-tumble, effectively ending the mission as required by NASA protocols. The mission is seen as both a success and a failure—yes, its objective was achieved, but it is aborted early, days before its scheduled conclusion, lest the already used thrusters become essential for an eventual return to Earth .
Once Armstrong is cleared of any failure on his part—he is, in fact, lauded for saving his own life and that of his crew-mate, Dave Scott, he is then used as a NASA ambassador among politicians, and it is on one of those junkets he hears of the Apollo 1 fire, which costs the lives of veteran astronauts Gus Grissom, his neighbor Ed White and Roger Chaffee.***** He also narrowly escapes his own fiery death by his last minute ejection from a lunar landing trainer that malfunctions and loses control.
The rest of the film follows his subsequent training and command for Apollo 11, which, planned to be the first lunar landing if all the objectives are met, is the most prized assignment among the astronauts, but bares heavy responsibility and scrutiny, something that only makes Armstrong withdraw further into his work and away from his family.
The work is isolating, and, given all the unknowns about the lunar surface and whether diseases might be brought back to Earth from contact with the soil, the crew is kept in hermetically sealed chambers for press conferences and maintain a restricted access. As if the suits and pressurized conditions aren't enough, it seems like layers upon layers are being put between Armstrong and his family. At one point, just before leaving for the isolation before the launch, Armstrong's wife Janet demands that he sits down with his sons and explains to them the danger of his mission...and that he might not come back, something Armstrong wants to avoid talking about given the company line of "highest confidence in the Mission." It goes awkwardly and with not the best of resolutions. No one is exactly comforted.
The tensest part of the film is, of course, the Moon Landing itself, as Armstrong has to pilot where no pilot has gone before to a landing field that is nothing but pot-holes that could break one of the lander's spindly legs, all the time that alarms are going off warning that the computer can't process all of the information being funneled to it, the lander is low of fuel and running on fumes, and its auto-pilot decides that it's going to land in a large crater strewn with crippling boulders. Armstrong has to yank control from the targeted systems, try and overshoot the crater's lip, draining the fuel even more before touching down on another world. It was tense when it was happening live on television 49 years ago, and it's just as tense when Chazelle has his choice of angles and a galloping soundtrack from his composer Jason Hurwitz.
Damien Chazelle has now made three movies (he's now 33)—Whiplash, First Man, and La La Land (which was made during the long and complicated pre-production of First Man) and those three movies could not be more different in style, genre, and energy, but each one is a confident and accomplished film about obsession and sacrifice in pursuit of a cherished goal. The other films were wild, fast-moving things that frequently soared, where First Man—which is all about soaring—has its most sublime moments in stillness and incredible silence. One can quibble with Gosling's performance as Armstrong being too morose, generally—one can't find any fault in Claire Foy's performance...at all—as Armstrong may have been restrained but hardly the "Debbie Downer" one might assume from this movie. But, as a portrait of a sacrificing hero, First Man quite triumphantly communicates the measure of a measured man.
* Clint Eastwood and Warner Bros. bought the rights to "First Man" in 2003, but the film never moved forward until acquired by Steven Spielberg for his Dreamworks Studio.
** Although Armstrong's boyhood fascination with model airplanes is hinted at by the sound of toy engines over the Universal/Dreamworks logos before the first image of the film—in the cockpit of an X-15—appears.
**** "Writing to silence" is a lovely little phrase that you can't "google" to any accuracy, but refers to the writerly act of speculation when there isn't anyone alive to provide the inspiration...or rebuttal...to what you commit to the page.
***** Okay, let's talk about the "flag" controversy. It's a non-issue, like complaining about no hedge monsters in The Shining. There are flags and stars and stripes all over First Man. But, for some reason...for some people...this discerning mature portrait of an American hero succeeds or fails on whether there's a scene of planting the American flag on the Moon (we DO see it, by the way, the flag, I mean). Okay, maybe these "critics" have their priorities (or something) "out of whack," but the filmmakers solved a potential problem that would REALLY get folks up in arms. One of the things that Armstrong revealed in the biography was that when he and Aldrin launched from the Moon's surface, the blast of the engine basically flattened the flag and knocked it to the ground. It wasn't stuck in very well as the astronauts had a hell of a time trying to hammer it deep enough into the clay-like lunar surface to make it anything other than precarious. Maybe nobody should mention it. Maybe those folks should find a way to get there and fix it. Maybe they should take a trip to the Moon.
The second group of selected astronauts responding to a direction to "stare off in the distance." Armstrong is in the upper-left looking up with his mouth agape.
*****
The ill-fated "Apollo 1" crew—White, Grissom and Chaffee—take a dim view of a model of their Apollo space capsule. At another time, Grissom hung a lemon on the capsule under construction.
***
The Armstrong's before NASA: Neil, son Eric, daughter Karen, Janet
Bobby Dorfman (Eisenberg) moves to the West Coast from the Bronx without any prospects. His mother Rose (Jeanne Berlin) calls her brother Phil Stern (Steve Carell), an established Hollywood agent, to give Bobby a leg up and maybe find him some work. He's family, after all. Stern is a big wheeler-dealer and a name-dropper of some magnitude, and, if anything, he'd just as soon forget he has any family on the East Coast, but after a week of prevaricating, he deigns to see Bobby and likes what he sees—an eager, puppy-eyed, but not naive intellectual who obviously looks up to his Uncle. There's no job in the mail-room, but maybe he can do some odd-jobs for Stern, he'll let his assistant Vonnie (Stewart) show him around town, and, hey, there's a party Phil's throwing where Bobby can meet a lot of IMPORTANT people. Important people.
Bobby does well. He mingles professionally, and meets a nice couple Steve and Rad Taylor (Paul Schneider and Parker Posey), who take a liking to Bobby. And his city-tours with Vonnie are his favorite part, riding around town looking at the extravagant homes, taking in shows at the bijou (the StanwyckThe Woman in Red is showing so it must be 1935), talking, getting familiar, both with the city and with Vonnie, with whom he starts to fall in love. For her part, Vonnie likes him but she has a boyfriend-journalist she tells Bobby about and they remain friends and confidantes.
Back in the Bronx, the Dorfman's are excited about Bobby's prospects, but the family is in turmoil with the youngest being so far from home—Rose worries but father Marty (Ken Stott) is unconcerned, sister Evelyn (Sari Lennick) and her communist husband Leonard (Stephen Kunken) are fighting with their neighbor, and brother Ben (Corey Stoll) has moved up from being a petty thief to a shady businessman with gangsterish tactics.
Back in Hollywood, the boyfriend falls out of the picture and Bobby and Vonnie become lovers. Bobby is already thinking about moving back to the Bronx with her as his wife, by Vonnie is slightly ambivalent about the prospect. Before long, the absent boyfriend comes back and Vonnie chooses him over Bobby, and he is left bereft-especially considering who that boyfriend is.
Anyone who's seen a Woody Allen in the past might be able to predict who the boyfriend is (even if IMDB didn't "spill the beans" in their "spoiler free" synopsis). The Woody-verse is pretty limited, even when doing multiple stories in a single movie (like To Rome With Love), so the acorns don't fall too far from The Woodman. There is no way Bobby can live with the humiliation, so he slinks back to the Bronx, back to his family. Brother Ben takes him at the juice joint he's running (the former business partner having become the cornerstone of some highway in the outskirts).
He makes a "go" of it, the nightclub becoming a New York hot-spot attracting the rich and powerful and under indictment. It's where Bobby meets his socialite shiksa wife (Blake Lively), also named Veronica, and life moves on successfully.
But, life has a way of cycling back on you, and Vonnie shows up at the nightclub like Ilsa Lund in Casablanca, and Bobby goes from the BMOC to also-ran in the blink of an entrance. He's happy and successful, but his disappointing past shows up to haunt him. And despite his success he still has to right the wrong. How messed up is that?
It's "Gatsby," yes, with a little bit of Billy Wilder thrown in to the mix, because Allen can't help but make things a little bit more complex than Fitzgerald was capable of—Allen is just as much a romantic, but can't quite get past the point being a realist about it, and looking past the glamour. It's only natural—that Hollywood angle again. Allen has always been deeply cynical about the veneer of Hollywood—maybe it's the constant sun (one of his early jokes was "I'm red-haired and fair-skinned; I don't tan, I stroke!"), the appropriated architecture. Hollywood both fascinates and repels; it's a foreign country to Allen as much as Rome or London or Spain.
But where Allen lucks out is in the casting. He has gotten two very subtle transformative performances out of Eisenberg and Stewart, two young actors who've taken a lot of hits lately—Eisensberg for his manic, burbling Lex Luthor in Batman v Superman, Stewart for her "damsel" roles in Twilight and Snow White. These two are character actors, not stars. They have quirks and rough edges that make them interesting. If you scraped them down to the least common denominator to make them more palatable and A-list, they'd only become more dull.
They're anything but dull here. Stewart is the "Daisy" it's been impossible to recreate in the official "Gatsby" adaptations, undeniably smart but with the annoying tendency to be vapid in moments of comfort and leaning to the path of least resistance, inspiring the need to strangle in the same moment you want to hug her. She's capable of showing you the woman you want her to be, while steadfastly being the woman she wants to be, even if they're in opposition. That, in "Gatsby" has lead to a character seeming weak or indecisive, but Stewart never betrays that or her character. And Eisenberg does something amazing here. The temptation is to say he's the "Woody Allen stand-in" for this movie, but the character and the way he plays it belies that. Bobby is too smart, too forthright. He doesn't natter or stammer uncertainly, for all the puppyish enthusiasm at the beginning, he pretty much knows who he is and stays direct, which is far afield from Allen's typical characters. He doesn't waffle. And when conflicts come, if anything, he internalizes, going uncharacteristically quiet when confronted with Vonnie again, and when appraising his situation in the latter part of the movie, his eyes don't appear to be seeing, but looking inward, not looking for a way out, but trapped in a self-realization that paralyzes him. For all the talk of dreams and romance, those eyes betray a melancholic amusement at his own fallibility.
