A perfect film

Rating: 10/10 (18 August 2006)

It's almost impossible to give an objective review of this film  a cultural phenomenon, the first modern Hollywood blockbuster, the movie that propelled Steven Spielberg to iconic status and was the progenitor of that horrible cinematic trend known as 'franchising.' Nonetheless, as I watched it yet again last Sunday, I realized I had never actually reviewed this film, and as I spend enough time poring over bad and mediocre films, it would be a nice change to review a good  nay, a great  one.
Set in the resort community of Amity, Jaws follows the story of what happens to the town when a shark comes hunting and threatens their precious summer economy. Of course there's much more than that going on; it's also the personal story of Sheriff Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) a man living on an island who's afraid of the water, and those who help him pursue the shark: oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and the colorful, cantankerous shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw).
Spielberg sets up the film economically and effortlessly, sketching Amity with exactly the right details, rendering it familiar to us in an instant. From the Boy Scout water badge tests to the man badgering the chief about painting a red zone on the curb in front of his house, Amity is suburban anywhere, circa 1975, a small, quiet town of normal people whom Spielberg breathes to life with swift but textured strokes. Standing out amongst them is Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), whose interest in preserving the town's economy nearly leads it to ruin; but rather than render the mayor a one-dimensional villain, Spielberg gives him a moment of stark humanity in a scene in the hospital where he is so unnerved by a shark attack a few hours earlier that he absent-mindedly starts to smoke. He turns to Brody and hisses in a wavering voice, "Martin, my kids were out there in that water too." While Hooper joins the proceedings relatively early (in a hilarious scene where every fisherman in the northeast is launching their boat to try and nab the $3K reward on the shark) and is saddled with the lion's share of educating the audience about sharks (the exposition is seamlessly worked into three conversations between Hooper and Brody), Spielberg is wise to save Quint until the second half of the picture. Although he makes a brief cameo earlier (scratching his nails on a chalkboard to gain everyone's attention  how's that for an entrance?), once Quint is on board full time the movie really kicks into high gear. His disdain for Hooper's easy life and modern gear aside, Quint is like a character straight out of Hemmingway, and Shaw fleshes him out to perfection. In the hands of another director and actor, Quint probably would have been easy to dislike, but here, he steals the show from the other two men, and again, much like the mayor, he is given his scene of humanity, where he discloses that he was a crew member of the USS Indianapolis, the ship that was torpedoed by the Japanese on a highly secret mission to deliver the atom bomb.
Spielberg masterfully follows the heroic plot arc in this movie. The hero's simple village is threatened by an external force it cannot understand or defeat; outsiders are brought in, even while the hero must face his own inner fears and 'grow up' to conquer them. Quint is the transitional hero here, an outsider in the community (even though he resides in Amity), whose anti-social nature and unwillingness to compromise permanently exclude him from the village; we know as soon as his boat is ruined that he will die, for now he has no home, no place to live (can we really picture Quint sitting at the Brody dinner table as Hooper did?).
Of course it's not just the brilliantly executed structure of Jaws that makes it so great; the performances are all spot-on, terrific; all three of the main actors shine here, and even tiny bit parts are played perfectly. Spielberg also uses terror more effectively here than he ever has since; while apparently the mechanical shark wouldn't work and he had to disguise it in filming and editing, not seeing the menace for most of the film heightens the suspense and terror far more than revealing it would have.
This film is Spielberg firing on all cylinders, every piece in place, a masterpiece from start to finish. It's rare that you encounter a perfect film, and that's a phrase I don't even like to use; but it certainly fits Jaws, which is as flawless a piece of movie-making as you will ever encounter. It's a good bet most of you have seen it (it is thirty-one years old, after all), but if you haven't seen it in a while, maybe it's time to get reacquainted with a classic once more.