JAWS
The ultimate male bonding movie
I saw Beaches last year for the sole purpose of hoping to gain a convert - I'd agreed to see it if the girl I made the deal with saw The Return Of The Living Dead. She never did watch it. Grr. Anyway, we almost made a two-movie deal - I'd see the movie she thought exemplified how women relate to each other, Steel Magnolias, and she'd see the one which I think exemplifies how men relate to each other. That movie would be Jaws. I didn't agree to finalize that deal until she held up her end of the bargain on the first one.
Based upon the novel by Peter Benchley (never read it, but I keep hearing it sucked), Jaws stars Roy Scheider as Martin Brody, the police chief of a small tourist-reliant community called Amity Island. When the remains of a young woman are found washed up on shore, he suspects it's a shark, but takes the coroner's politically-pressured word that it was a boating accident. But soon enough, a boy is killed by a shark in front of a whole crowd of people, and chaos ensues when the boy's mother calls for a bounty on the offending fish. So Brody calls in an ichthyologist (Richard Dreyfuss) to determine just what killed that girl. Sure enough, it's a shark - not just any shark, but a big great white shark, 25 feet long (not quite as big as the poster art suggests), and it's clearly planning to be a repeat customer of Chez Amity. It's still not enough to close the beaches, and yet another unlucky bastard finds himself sliding down the beastie's gullet. Pretty much writing off the tourist season, they team up with a shark-obsessed, crusty seaman (Robert Shaw) to hunt the beast before Amity Island's long-term tourist trade dries up (and before the shark eats enough islanders to make the ailing tourist trade a fairly trivial problem in comparison).
What Steven Spielberg has essentially made with Jaws is the nigh-unattainable standard to which summer movies, at their best, aspire. It's loaded with thrills and laughs, as a summer movie should be at the very least, but at its core are human relationships and a look at three men being men the best way they know how - in a VERY liberal nutshell, they're a Responsible Adult, a macho asshole, and an ambition-driven obsessive.
Despite what I've heard about Benchley's book, the script for this movie is great (by Benchley and Carl Gottlieb), as good as I've ever heard for this kind of film. Hey, it gives us the line "You're gonna need a bigger boat," which many of us have applied to daily discourse when we run across a challenge too big for us to presently meet. C'mon, I've done it, admit it, you have too.
How these three men - strangers before the action of the film - relate to each other is fascinating to behold. The triangle of relationships here is like a microcosm of how men treat each other from day to day - Shaw relentlessly challenges the other two to be as gruff and worldly as he, Dreyfuss torn between trying to prove himself and trying to not care, and Scheider just tyring to keep it all together. When I look at these three, I see teachers and students, brothers, friends, co-workers, rivals, enemies, business partners...pretty much everything except gay lovers, and even those probably wouldn't be too hard to find for a queer theorist (although I've found that queer theorists can find gay subtexts in shale).
The film's finest moment is a lengthy monologue from Shaw regarding the experience with sharks that led him to pursue them throughout his life. I can never get much of a straight answer regarding who wrote this; I've heard it was Benchley, I've heard it was Shaw, I've heard it was Howard Sackler, I've heard it was Gottlieb, I've heard it was Spielberg, and I've heard every combination of the five. I'd ask y?'all to set me straight, but you know I can't believe you any more than I believe anybody else.
I don't really know what to compare Shaw's performance to, having little knowledge of the rest of his career, but it borders on parody, certainly inviting it, offering toasts like "Here's to swimmin' with bowlegged women" and singing sea-shanties. What can I say, I loved every minute of it, ahhr, ahhr. Dreyfuss, not an actor known for his restraint, similarly overdoes things, and similarly enjoyably. Scheider, however, turns in the best performance of his career as a thoughtful husband and father who's always on the verge of losing credibility with the townspeople he serves. He's from New York, and not an islander (there are a number of mentions in the film as to how if you're not born on the island, you never get to be an islander). There are lengths to which he must go to establish the kind of respect he MIGHT one day earn if he weren't an outsider. And yeah, sometimes, those lengths include packing up on a shaky boat to hunt a killing machine that could swallow you whole.
Awesome, deservedly Oscar-winning score from John Williams, probably my favorite of his other than The Empire Strikes Back. The shark-theme from this movie is possibly the most famous, instantly identifiable piece of film music ever, and has been ripped off, parodied, and homage'd about a million times, never once having its credibility or effectiveness eroded by it all in the least. The score does get a little too playful at times, though; but this IS John Williams.
There are a lot of complaints these days about the hokiness of the shark (christened "Bruce" by the film crew and/or Spielberg); I've never had much of a problem with it. The most we see of it is when it thrusts itself so far out of the water, it's actually resting its head on the floor of the boat. Okay, that's pretty fake, and when it attacks a shark cage, it's not entirely convincing either. But most of its appearances are seen from above the surface of the water while it is underneath, and those are splendidly done. Almost all of the film's action takes place in the daytime; Spielberg does not need to give the shark the cover of darkness to hide it.
I do have to wonder about something in this movie which has cropped up in all sorts of shark movies ever since: do sharks really ram things with their snouts? I was under the impression that their snouts are quite tender. It doesn't seem to me that they would ram things with their snouts any more than I would use my scrotum to trap squirrels.
As a teenager, I'd heard about a hundred times that the making of Jaws killed one guy - I have no idea who, and I can't find any reference to such an accident today. The movie took the title of the biggest moneymaker in history, and held it for two years. As you might imagine, sequels weren't far behind; three of them, each of which was approximately two-ninths as good as the previous entry (meaning that Jaws 2 was still pretty good), until finally settling on the hilariously bad Jaws: The Revenge. It also gave rise to innumerable imitations (though very few of them actually involved sharks), particularly Benchley's own book and miniseries The Beast, which basically carbon-copies everything here, replacing the shark with a giant squid.
A really tremendous movie (and cinema milestone) on every front. I don't see Spielberg ever topping this, although I do enjoy and appreciate his attempts.