Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story…well deserved applause and jeers
They don’t make ‘em like they used to…or, maybe they do.
The critics are divided over Steven Spielberg’s remake of the 1961 West Side Story, which back then captured 10 Oscars, including Best Picture.
Top that? Give Spielberg his due. He was game, and willing to give it a try, supported by a budget of 100 million dollars…and now playing in theatres everywhere.
For some, even most reviewers, yes, it was worth all that, and for any doubters out there…” those wonderful people out in the dark,” (Norma Desmond), we are ecstatically assured that Spielberg has not lost his touch, but that he has indeed surpassed the 1961 classic, so what’s stopping you from buying a ticket?
Alas, so far the movie is tanking at the box office, for reasons nobody can figure out. Perhaps Covid and the few bad reviews are keeping people away.
Can it be politics, and that only Democrats will go watch anything directed by Spielberg and written by Tony Kushner? Both are flaming Liberals.
If that’s what’s happening…politics bleeding into art and entertainment…then guilty we are for succumbing to our baser instincts.
But so are director Spielberg and his screenwriter Tony Kushner.
They too are guilty and they don’t get off claiming artistic immunity, not when they’re so loudly in your face in the service of radical Liberalism…as when Spielberg chose the Spanish dialogue in the film to run along without subtitles because, he said, he did not want the English to have power over the Spanish.
That’s a political decision, not an artistic decision, and what shameful pandering this is, and it comes with a price – lousy box office.
The play should be the thing, and we should be allowed to appreciate the music without political interference.
For example, I’d rather know Kushner the artist, and not Kushner the authority on politics and world events, as when he tellsYale Israel Review, the following – “Israel was founded in a program that, if you really want to be blunt about it, was ethnic cleansing, and that today is behaving abominably towards the Palestinian people.”
So now let me be blunt about it, which is to say that Kushner has it all backwards, and that in tolerant/freedom-loving Israel he and his husband can speak and behave freely.
In Gaza they’d be tossed off tall buildings.
By a margin of 90 percent, Jerusalem’s Arabs say they prefer Israeli rule instead of being governed by the Palestinian Authority.
That, for some, is an inconvenient truth.
Maybe Spielberg chose the right project, but the wrong writer.
From West Side Story, the song Somewhere goes like this --- “There’s a place for us, somewhere a place for us, peace and quiet and open air, wait for us somewhere.”
Leonard Bernstein composed the music; Stephen Sondheim wrote the words, for the 1957 stage play.
Two artistic geniuses writing about a NYC turf war, but the yearning is entirely Jewish, whether straight up or subliminal…and the message still rings for a Jewish homeland.
Through “Schindler’s List” and his Holocaust Foundation, Spielberg can be counted on to speak well of Jews dead and buried.
But Jews living lively in the open air of Israel …these make trouble and cause him a problem. Likewise, Kushner, and so together, in 2005, they gave us a movie that mendaciously equates the victim with the murderer, in yet another example of Jews suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.
In “Munich,” directed by Spielberg, co-written by Kushner, they took the oldest scenario in the world… good guys versus bad guys…and turned it into bad guys versus bad guys.
Or maybe it’s Kushner who all alone imposes his prejudices within Spielberg’s films.
In some minds, evil and good weigh about the same…possibly the tragedy of our times.
The movie was ostensibly based on the actual 1972 massacre at the Munich Summer Olympics, when PLO terrorists murdered 11 Israeli Olympians in an atrocity that shocked the world.
For about five minutes.
The Israelis never forgot. They sent undercover agents around the world to track and eliminate the killers.
In bygone Hollywood they would be directed by John Ford and played by Gary Cooper, the strong silent hero that can be counted on to take care of business.
In the hands of Spielberg and Kushner, “Munich” is full of words, more than half of them given to the killers who are scripted, by Kushner, to eloquently justify their bloodlust.
So for Spielberg and Kushner, the Israelis never get a break, even in a movie. The most they can count on is moral equivalence.
Now Kushner says his views on Israel have been mischaracterized. How so? We all speak the same English. He says, “I want the state of Israel to continue to exist.”
Gee, thanks.
Such breaking news I will immediately pass along to my relatives in Israel…that it’s okay for them to stay. Tony Kushner says so.
But keep the bags packed in case he changes his mind.
As for Spielberg, there is no joy, no schadenfreude, for this particular box office failure. I am sure he feels he deserves better for all the toil and expectation.
Join the club.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com
