Jaws (

1975

)

If you’re reading this you don’t need me to tell you that Jaws is great, you likely already know and you’ve likely already seen it before at least once yourself. Indeed, giving this a perfect rating feels almost a bit cheap, shouldn’t I be at least trying to point out flaws in it and find things that make it fall short? Isn’t it a critic’s duty to approach every film, no matter how beloved (either by the masses, his peers or his own past self) with a skeptical eye? Well, I tried it and after watching Jaws for the umpteenth time, I only found more about the film to love. Hell, even the jump scare that I knew was coming managed to get the better of me once again. I’ll just have to settle for writing my least controversial review to date.

Jaws’ story should be familiar even to the handful of poor viewers who haven’t gotten a chance to watch it, as it has been copied and repurposed by every Mother Nature’s Revenge film and sci-fi channel movie of the week. One summer, a great white shark begins to eat people off the coast of Amity (Martha’s Vineyard in all but name), starting with the now obligatory teenage skinny dipper. The recently appointed police chief Brody is all in favor of closing the beaches but he is over-ruled by Mayor Larry Vaughn and the town council who are worried that publicizing the shark attack will drive away tourists who constitute the town’s primary source of income. After a young boy, Alex Kitner falls victim to the same shark though even the staunchest skeptic can no longer believe that Amity’s waters are safe; Brody, who feels personally responsible for the boy’s death, least of all. He gains some additional support in the form of Hooper, a wealthy scientist from the Oceanographic Institute. Even so, everyone else in town is willing to believe the shark is dead when a group of local fishermen comes in with the corpse of a tiger shark, despite the fact that Alex Kitner’s remains are not in the shark’s stomach.

Brody, driven by guilt and feelings of inadequacy, investigates further and proves that not only is the tiger shark not the killer shark but that the real shark must be much, much bigger. Nobody, least of all Mayor Vaughn is willing to listen to him and due to the structure of the town’s charter, it takes a civic ordinance, not a police order to close the beaches. So, on the Fourth of July, the beaches are packed with potential victims, and a hungry shark is prowling the waters. It’s only after Brody’s own son Michael is nearly eaten that the intransient authorities finally listen to the constant warnings and pony up the money for Brody to hire Quint the island’s only professional shark hunter. Hooper insists on going along with the others if only for a chance to observe a giant man-eating great white in person. It’s here that the film shrinks into a compelling three-man character drama/action-adventure strongly reminiscent of Moby Dick, though lacking the novel’s heavy intellectual baggage. The simple fact that Quint, Hooper, and Brody all have distinct personalities that lead to clashes and tensions between the three that nonetheless don’t prevent them from working together is the core of this sequence. The outside menace of the shark only provides a motivation for the three men, at least until the final destructive climax when the shark gets the upper hand on the trio of shark hunters.

The first half of Jaws can best be described as densely cluttered. The main characters are crammed onto the screen with a whole host of supporting roles and everyone is talking over each other. There is so much noise and activity happening in the margins of the frame, from locals complaining about a busted picket fence to one of sheriff Brody’s kids coming in with cut from playing on a busted swing set, that it's impossible to keep track of everything that is happening. This, in turn, explains why Jaws can seem fresh even after a dozen viewings; there are always some details in these densely packed scenes that will escape the audience’s notice. I, for instance, didn’t notice the fact that Mayor Vaughn constantly carried and played with an unlit cigarette throughout the film’s entire first act until last year and I’ve been watching this movie since grade school! This is the full cinematic realization of flighty dreams of such auteurs as Howard Hawks and Robert Altman. Here, this dense naturalistic style is used to draw the audience into a world by bombarding us constantly with a stream of unnecessary details and set dressing. The island of Amity comes alive as we become invested in the little day-to-day details that just happen to be unfolding in the wake of the horrific shark attack.

Unlike his predecessors though, Spielberg here knows when to drop the act and draw the audience’s attention into a single, often horrifying detail. Just look how all the noise cuts away when Brody sees the shark attack on the beach (also check out the sweet Vertigo (1958) reference), or when Quint makes his announcement to the town council, or when Mrs. Kitner confronts Brody about his negligence. These scenes hit twice as hard as they normally would, just because for once there’s no unnecessary chatter going on in the background. Unlike many films that use a dense, naturalistic style Jaws does not drown its crucial dramatic scenes in layers of muck. Indeed, once the diegetic and dramatic need for such style has gone away Jaws promptly abandons the whole ruse and becomes a straightforward and well-made thriller. Compared to the first half, the climax of Jaws with Hooper, Quint, and Brody on the Orca is downright lean and minimalist. In my review of Duel (1971) I noted that Spielberg had a great understanding of the power and elegance of simplicity and that is on full display in Jaws’ second half. We have three men, all of whom we know intimately, a shark that awes us, and a host of shark hunting equipment that we are slowly and purposefully introduced to as the sequence unfolds. It’s masterfully made all the more impressive by the dense film that preceded it.

Jaws would change forever the business of filmmaking. In the late 1960s, the new crop of studio heads had effectively admitted that they did not know how to make popular films. For nearly a decade, these executives ceded that responsibility to their directors who increasingly turned out weirder and more experimental films that would have previously been allowed in mainstream Hollywood. This was the era dubbed “New Hollywood” best exemplified by such movies as Bullitt (1968), Taxi Driver (1976) and The Wild Bunch (1969). Many of these films are great, even if critics have a tendency to overhype the era as some mythical golden age, yet the film industry still struggled compared to its heyday during WWII. Filmmakers and studio heads still made money, but it wasn’t the kind of hand-over-fist cash that they had grown accustomed to. The massive commercial success of Jaws showed studios that they could make vast amounts of money on a single “blockbuster hit.” Yet Jaws only provided the inspiration for these financial maneuverings, it did not provide a template on which future films could base themselves. Jaws is simply too masterfully put together, too dense and perfect a film to be simply copied by a mercenary director. I mean, just look at any of the innumerable Jaws knock-offs or even the film’s own canonical sequels for proof of that. No shark attack movie (or indeed any animal attack film) has ever come close to Jaws’ perfection. It would take Star Wars (1977) to complete the template and show the suits in the front office how they could make money in perpetuity. Star War (1977), of course, is another masterpiece, but one whose reliance on a whole host of tropes made it easier for hacks to replicate.

Jaws was based on a novel by Peter Benchley, but despite the novelist's involvement on the screenplay, the movie diverges significantly from the original work. In the original book, Mayor Larry Vaughn’s opposition to closing the beaches was rooted in his ties to organized crime rather than mundane cupidity and arrogance. By disposing of this human evil that was present in the original book, Jaws the film becomes a story about disparate humans banding together (albeit slowly and clumsily) in the face of a common threat. This is most obvious on the boat when Quint, Hooper, and Brody all have different ideas about how to kill the shark (Quint trusts in old-fashioned fishing equipment, Hooper in his shark cage and poison, and Brody desperately wants to go back to shore and get a “bigger boat”); eventually, they bond and work together but it’s an uphill struggle at times. The same is true, in more general terms when the film is still on dry land with different characters having a variety of approaches to fighting the shark (from ignoring it as the Mayor does to offering a bounty as Mrs. Kitner does, to trying to catch it with a chain and pot roast like the two local yokels try in an amusing and terrifying interlude). Jaws is a story of ordinary people gradually finding common ground in a moment of crisis.

It’s for this reason that some critics interpret the story in a post-Watergate light. Either casting Brody et al. trying to heroically restore order in the wake of an unexpected catastrophe, or replacing the human evil of the novel with the inhuman threat of the shark as a means of exorcizing post-Watergate cynicism. Normally, I love to fit films into their larger historical picture but these theories either don’t make any sense or are reaching too far. Indeed, like Duel (1971) I find this quest for subliminal meanings to an excellent film a bit tiring. Jaws is perfectly satisfactory if we let the shark just be a shark.