Movie Review Roulette #6: Jaws

Almost three months past due, here’s Jaws.

39 years later and it’s still arguably the greatest summer movie.

I don’t mean “summer blockbuster”, per se (although there’s an argument for that too). I mean the movie I most indelibly associate with the season of summer.

The most wintry of movies for me, for example, is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s far from the most snow-covered film, but its moodiness, and its willingness to bask in both the gray misery and gentle beauty of winter make it my favorite film to watch in the January cold.

Autumn for me means Halloween, and the ultimate Halloween movie is, well, Halloween. It’s not my favorite horror film, (it ranks behind The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Suspiria, and 28 Days Later in my personal list) but it is the movie that brings to life the twinge of fear that comes with the chill in the October air.

Spring for me is liveliness and cheer. I will watch The Princess Bride any time of year, but it is best paired with the first warm evenings of April, when the snow has melted and you just want spend some time with a cheerful old friend.

And so it is with Jaws and the summer. Part of it might be regional bias. The film is set in the fictional town of Amity Island, clearly a stand-in for Martha’s Vineyard, where it was filmed. It is the most New England of summer movies. The locales will still feel familiar to anyone from coastal Massachusetts, where kinship to the ocean has never faded from the region’s seafaring days of yore. You can almost smell the salty air in this movie, the rusty musk of boats in harbor, or feel the ever present sand that tracks near any building close enough to the water.

And then there’s Quint. I hail from New Bedford, Massachusetts, the saltiest of New England sailing towns, and let me tell you dear reader, the only problem with Quint is that there is only one of him. I suppose that in a tourist haven like Amity Island, there might be more shark-crazy posers than actual fishers of very big fish. But Robert Shaw’s assuredness, the way you can tell that he knows more about the sea than he does his mother by his gait alone, is one of the crucial details this movie gets right.

I have spoken of Jaws so far as if it is a documentary about life in a coastal Massachusetts town, when you no doubt came here to read a take on a movie about a huge shark eating lots and lots of people. Trust me, I will get there. My dawdling on salt and sand is for a reason: salt and sand and crusty sailors are what separate Jaws from traditional monster fare. A lesser director could have taken this story, followed it beat for beat, and ended up with a forgettable b-movie.

It is well known that the mechanical shark constructed for the movie was a nightmare, so prone to malfunction that director Steven Spielberg made sure the audience saw as little of it as possible. While John Williams’ immortal score has rightly been celebrated for its function as a stand-in for the shark for much of the film, equally important is how Spielberg established a town where this story can to be told, and characters who live there. A monster movie can work just fine with without thinking about its setting as a place needing to be saved, or its characters as people with lives and motivations. But Jaws is a classic not just because of the shark, but because we actually care about the people chasing it.

Consider Roy Scheider’s performance as Brody, Amity Island’s police chief. Scheider had one of my favorite faces in acting, so easily shifting from quiet weariness to steeled anger, the weight of his burdens always just behind his eyes. He is not just a functional protagonist, serving his purpose in providing us someone to follow so the movie can move from point A to point B. He is a man who hates the water who gradually realizes that he has no choice but to face his fears to keep his town safe. It’s a subtle hero’s journey, conveyed as much through Scheider’s performance as the script.

Consider Richard Dreyfuss as Hooper. Again, this is a functional character in a typical monster movie: the scientist, there to spout exposition and geek out when he sees the shark in person. The film gives him just a bit more depth than that, at it makes all the difference. Hooper is a rebellious kid from a rich family, devoting his life to studying sharks much to the shame of his parents. Dreyfuss’s performance is winning and energetic where so many actors portraying similar characters wilt and die on screen as their purpose is served.

Jaws is an uncommonly quotable thriller. Scheider’s immortal delivery of “you’re gonna need a bigger boat” is a killer line of dialogue. But it also provides a terrific moment of contrast between two characters, as Brody’s sudden terror upon seeing the shark contrasts with  Quint’s unaffected gaze.

And the USS Indianapolis scene, with its hypnotic monologue by Robert Shaw, is an exercise in patience in a genre that so often has none. It’s a masterfully filmed, written, and acted scene, generating tension without a single shot of the water, and elevating Quint from an archetype to a haunted, tragic character.

And yes, that score by John Williams is one of the most important in movie history. Spielberg knew that what we imagine can be far more frightening than what we see. John Williams filled that gap with the simplest but most haunting of scores. Its effect reminds me of John Carpenter’s theme for Halloween, both cases of musical minimalism hinting at terrors in the deep recesses of our imaginations.

Jaws was far from the first blockbuster to succeed by scaring audiences out of their wits. But it’s rare that it does so in broad daylight, in the heat of the summer, out on the water. There’s something primordially frightening about the ocean, something inherently eerie about small coastal towns that try just a bit too hard to be perfect. HP Lovecraft knew this. Spielberg’s take on this very New England brand of scares is less cosmic than Lovecraft’s but the source of the fright is the same, exemplified in the movie’s nightmarish, nighttime opening (where a skinny dipping young woman becomes the shark’s first victim) : there’s something lurking in the water. Have fun swimming.