Jaws

“Smile, you son of a bitch.” Jaws was one of my formative experiences with film. Around the same summer, I remember discovering it and Pulp Fiction and Heat and Se7en and Good Will Hunting and watching those all in rotation with nothing better to do that entire season was what really decided to feed my appetite and set me on a path to start viewing movies as an actual passion, something that I could take a genuine interest in and adopt as my preferred art form, something that could be immersive and exciting and more than just an excuse to see Batman in vivid motion. All that can be planted again on the shoulders of Steven Spielberg. I just spent the bulk of June at the man’s feet, praising him as ardently as I could for his work on the Indiana Jones franchise, but here I am again. It’s all deserved, though, especially when you know just how much of a tormented and brutal production that this was. But it shows his resolve and his complete capability even this early on in his journey that he was able to drag an absolute bonafide masterpiece out of all of that. Not having a working shark turned out to be a blessing in disguises because it gave Spielberg a chance to show up and show out, flexing his already masterful abilities. And that’s where his greatness factors in. Jaws is undoubtedly a harrowing and, at times, terrifying experience. But it also feels like a full blooded Spielbergan epic. That John Williams score, the gorgeous scale and spectacle, the absolutely riveting sense of adventure that guides the bulk of the third act have always kept me from fully regarding this as a horror flick and more as an out and out adventure. But then I say that and it still has one of the most effective and horrific jump scares ever put to film. It’s funny because, as much as that third act is a total thrill ride, the shark stuff is usually in the back of my mind when I think of Jaws and what makes it so great to me. I remember when I first got my hands on this film, I went all in. Sought out the original novel and read it cover to cover. It’s been said a million times but it’s almost baffling just how much better the film is than the novel that it came from, with a far better and far more enjoyable iteration of the core cast of characters. The original novel is a relatively joyless and dour read, with a fairly flat ending compared to the one in the film that’s gone down in the annals of cinematic history. Our three leads are all staggering. Roy Scheider is one of the most underrated and under-appreciated actors that we ever had, his brilliance was far more quiet and natural than so many of his contemporaries. When you’re younger, it’s easy to disregard Scheider and Brody when you stack him up to his far more eccentric and bombastic co-stars but as you get older, he’s so fucking great. My favorite leads in things like this, especially among Spielberg’s canon, is when you take a completely ordinary man and stick him in one of the most horrifying conceivable situations. Absolute top tier badass movie moment when he kills that damn shark. Robert Shaw is rightfully legendary as Quint, I can remember being totally captivated and mesmerized by the USS Indianapolis monologue, going as far as to memorize and quote it word for word just because I thought it was the greatest thing I had ever seen up to that point. My favorite, though, has always been Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper. One of my favorite movie moments is when he inspects the body of the girl killed in the opening, where he goes over the wounds and the damage with both the trepidation of a terrified man looking down the eye of a monster and the orgasmic awe of a lover. Dreyfuss gives Hooper an almost wild eyed, bordering on unhinged flair that makes him the most effortlessly watchable of the entire film. One of my favorite movie characters! The 1970s really may just be the greatest era for American movies. So many of the films released in that era hold up and transcend their era, representing a change and a move towards far more adult and brave generation of films. The best of the bunch age more and more powerfully with time. Watching Jaws in a post-pandemic world was strangely and unexpectedly poignant. There’s a lot to be said about watching the three guys chase Bruce the Shark across the sea and all the slam bang and great character beats, but it’s very fascinating to go back to 1975 after the tumultuous year that was 2020 and see a story about one man proclaiming that a community has to be safe and work together to avoid a threat that hovers all of them, while high end politicians try to silence his voice and encourage people to pretend that everything is fine, even if it lines them up at death’s door. Jaws remains the masterpiece that it has always been for almost fifty years. A revelatory film for one of our true greatest living filmmakers and a chillingly timely one in ways that couldn’t have possibly been predicted.