An impeccably-made summer popcorn thriller where the characters are as important as the creature

Rating: 10/10 (5 March 2014)

Making a movie monster that is genuinely, viscerally scary is not easy. Making it scary in broad daylight, when artificiality cannot be hidden away in shadow, is even harder. Hardest of all is creating movie characters that archetypal enough to become iconic yet human enough to connect with each other and with the audience on more than a surface level. "Jaws" makes all of these things look ridiculously easy. It's such an engrossing, enjoyable (even when startling) experience that its quality is something you feel on an instinctive, subconscious level rather than something you can think about and convince yourself of. Only during an umpteenth watching might you be able to pry yourself out of the moment long enough to consider why it works so well. I think the crucial ingredient in the alchemy, more than the life-like and glassy-eyed shark robots that famously never worked during shooting, more than the heart-pounding zoom on the beach as Chief Brody realizes that the shark and his child are both in the pond, more than the brilliant and artful editing in the next scene as he runs faster and faster through the crowd of beachgoers while the camera jumps closer and closer to him, and even more than the John Williams score that is surely the most imitated among his oeuvre of unlikely hits... more than these, I think it is the characters and the casting that seal "Jaws"'s place as one of the best movies of all time.
Roy Scheider is Chief Brody, a serious cop type with the rather obvious quirk of hating the water, but he plays the role with a method-esque realism that allows us to imagine ourselves in his shoes. Scheider plays Brody on the edge, well shy of neurotic but definitely bottling a lot in, and it doesn't take much to tip him over into anger, fear or, finally, joy. He's up against two much less method-y, much less bottled-up actors and characters: Richard Dreyfuss's nerdy, cocky scientist and Robert Shaw's... well, adjectives fall short of what Shaw creates for Quint, the captain of the Orca. Quint is the broadest, most familiar archetype in the film, a salty sea dog who reckons experience over book-learning, but Shaw fills the character to overflowing with history and personality. His monologue about the real-life 1945 sinking of the USS Indianapolis, filmed in a long unbroken take that feels eerily still and breathless, is the highlight of the movie. Slow, quiet monologues are NEVER the highlights of thrillers, horrors, and summer popcorn fare. But "Jaws" is unique. These three characters bounce off each other and at any moment can and do explode into conflict, but they also have enough depth that each one can lock in with the others in interesting and unexpected ways. Sometimes it's Scheider and Dreyfuss's grounded characters against the unstable Quint. At other times it's the landlubbing Brody who's out of the loop while the two experts trade fish tales. We probably wouldn't want to join them on the boat, but they're always great fun to watch on screen. Spielberg's cameras are arranged so that three men can almost always fit in the same frame at the same time.
It's impossible to imagine "Jaws" without its supporting cast, too, especially Lorraine Gary as Ellen Brody and Murray Hamilton as Mayor Larry Vaughn, but it's the three principles who are indispensable and irreplaceable. Their absence is a big reason why none of the three Jaws sequels work or really even count. If "Jaws 2" is tolerable, it is only the presence of Scheider that makes it so. On the other hand, even a reunion of all three main characters from the first movie couldn't have saved the stupefyingly stupid script of "Jaws 4: The Revenge" of "This Time It's Personal" infamy. Perhaps it is the highest testament to the quality of "Jaws" that people went to see those later movies, in the ever-vanishing hopes that they would recapture even a glimmer of the glory of the original.