A bigger boat

Rating: Null/10 (17 March 2000)

A quarter of a century on, this remains Spielberg's most perfectly accomplished film, at once poetic and fiercely efficient, without a trace of the mawkishness, and latterly preachiness, that has marred much of what he has done since. The disastrous watershed of `Star Wars' and the dumbed-down 80s lay ahead. `Jaws' marks the final flowering of the mass-market Hollywood genre movie as high art.
Like the best of the Westerns, this film resonates with the myths of the Old World. It is Homeric in form: the internecine squabbling on land in the film's first half is the `Iliad'; the testing of Brody at sea in the second part, the `Odyssey'. (`Show me the way to go home', he sings in his cups.) The great shark is the monster threatening the community that, like Theseus or Oedipus, Brody must sally forth to slay, testing and discovering himself in the process. There is something of Athenian tragedy, too, in the veiled and grieving mother who curses Brody at the dockside. Every hometown in America had its Mrs Kintner during Vietnam, and the guilt of that war  barely past when `Jaws' was made  is surely the film's deeply coded subject-matter.
`Amity, as you know, means friendship', intones the corrupt mayor, a small-town Nixon with a taste for horrendous polyester sports-jackets; yet its good burghers collude in the sacrifice of their children for the sake of a quiet life and an honest buck, and  as in Ibsen's `Enemy of the People'  disown the decent citizen who tries to blow the whistle. In a sense, Amity/America has conjured the predator into being. Quint's grisly yarn (scripted, it is said, by an uncredited John Milius) of the wreck of the USS `Indianapolis'  the film has a kind of out-of-body experience at this point  implies that this is Nature's revenge for the sin of Hiroshima (`Anyway, we delivered the Bomb'); as if the shark, cheated of full atonement in 1945, had followed this ancient mariner home, claiming him as a final (superbly gruesome) canape before sinking forever into the deep.
The film is framed by the clanging of a bell upon the waters, first in the stillness of night, finally in the light of day. Rarely has the space immediately in front of the lens been so effectively used to create a sense of depth and subjectivity  often, a face in extreme close-up filling one edge of the Panavision frame, almost breaking forward from the plane of the screen. We watch the boat set sail, ominously framed by a shark's bleached jawbone in the window of Quint's boathouse; the camera glides forward, through the jagged O, after the departing vessel, as if reaching out to call it back; the next shot, eerily and perfectly picking up the flow of that movement, is a direct reverse  we look back from the boat, over Brody's shoulder and following his gaze, at same window, receding in the distance (our last sight of land until the credits roll), the jawbone just discernible as a tiny ghostly shape behind the pane. Far out at sea, Quint's haunting tale told, the shark attacks in the darkness before dawn; Brody scrambles onto deck, fumbling to load his revolver, his face lurching towards the camera, then turning aside in a moment of stillness while, in the sky behind, we glimpse, for a fraction of a second, the low diagonal streak of a chance meteor, a foreboding of disaster and a sign of grace.
This is film-making of the very first order, effortlessly transcending its commerciality and genre, luminous with pity, fear and wonder. `Jaws' has featured in every `ten best' list this viewer has ever scribbled on a tablecloth. Time has not wearied it. See it again soon.