There's something going on under the surface

Rating: 10/10 (4 January 2007)

NOTE: This review discusses the ending of the film.
Jaws is virtually goreless, and we don't see the shark at all until almost an hour has gone by, and yet watching this film remains one of the most terrifying ways anyone can ever spend two hours. What sells it isn't the big toothy beast with the fins, but the people who have to deal with its presence.
Jaws is set in Amity Island, a self-consciously idyllic tourist resort around the July 4th holiday. The beauty of the setting, shot to resemble the wonderful summer breaks we all think we experienced, is crucial to a film that hinges on the sense of contrast. The monster is horrific but this horror is set in stark opposition to the carefully-constructed carefree bliss of Amity, and that makes it all the harder to get to grips with – there is no retreat, nowhere that people can go to unwind because perfection has a killer lurking just out of sight. The cynical, paranoid chief Brody (Roy Scheider) has to endure the unimportant domestic quibbles of the town's bovine population, a stumbling block preventing him from giving full attention to the real problem. This sense of contrast and the frustration it fosters is never illustrated more effectively than the scene where old Harry (Alfred Wilde) sits in front of him, blocking his view of the sea just before the shark attacks.
This being the era of burgeoning postmodernism, Amity's idyll is wholly artificial, a construct by the cynical and greedy mayor (Murray Hamilton) and various local businesses that depend on summer tourists for the economy of the town, and who value the dollar far more than human life. The shameless capitalism is best seen in the journalist Meadows, who wants to downplay the story of Alex Kitner's death and then highlight the captured tiger shark, which realistically is highly unlikely to be the real culprit but, more importantly, is a perfect excuse to keep the beaches open. As Mayor Vaughn impedes Brody at every turn, putting people in danger, the tension of the film mounts. This, and the film's lack of any real red herrings (perhaps the shark ate them) contribute to the forced removal of any sense of false security. In its place is just a sense of permanent, knuckle-gnawing uncertainty. Things come to a head in the only way they can – the heartless businessmen have pushed their luck as far as they can the result is spectacular, fatal and very, very public.
And so into the second half, where Brody, oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and grizzled seaman Quint (Robert Shaw) – who looks like instead of being born he just came walking out of the sea one day – set out in a ludicrously ill-equipped floating shed called the Orca to find and kill the shark. The levels of fear diminish slightly, but the tension is maintained in the tiny, claustrophobic environment as personalities clash. The Ahab mk II that is Quint has nothing but disdain for the educated Hooper, whom he perceives to be an ivory-tower intellectual whose dedication to academia is no substitute for his own practical experience; Brody meanwhile is a cowardly landlubber who is best suited to the menial tasks like chumming and tying knots. Any distinctions between characters are soundly mocked by the threat they face – a soulless killer that can't be understood, rationalised or empathised with. It simply kills, because that's all that's in its nature. Meanwhile, Quint's famous monologue about the U.S.S. Indianapolis, delivered by a breathtakingly intense Shaw, shows that the characters themselves have more to them that meets the eye.
So it is that the pale-faced intellectual ("been counting money all your life" sneers Quint at one point) proves his worth by choosing to enter the water with the creature, the hard-nosed working man's strength comes to nothing as the shark gobbles him up, and the coward saves the day. This isn't done in a trite "finding the courage" kind of way, but simply because there are no other options left. It's that or get eaten, and as such the complexities of the characters fall under the might of the shark's sheer indiscrimination and simplicity. He's no less of a landlubber, and consequently all the more a hero, and Jaws is all the more a classic film.