Fear of the Real, Grounded in Reality

Rating: 10/10 (17 February 2011)

One of the first "high concept" films and father of the American summer blockbuster tradition, happens over no other than July 4 weekend on Amity Island, a vacation resort fuelled by the dollars of its tourism. A famed opening sequence sets up the incidence of a man-eating shark in the coastal waters. A girl goes swimming by moonlight and is pulled under, shrieking. All indications identify a shark, but Mayor Vaughn doesn't want to scare away tourists, and instructs Brody, the police chief, to keep the beaches open. The mayor marches along the beach wearing a sport coat and tie, persuading people to go into the water. They do, with inevitable consequences.
A town meeting is disrupted by the second of the film's central characters, the coarse, peering Quint. He grates his fingernails down a blackboard with a sketch of a shark and proposes his help as a bounty hunter. Later on, Brody sits at home thumbing through books on sharks, an expedient that establishes the predator in our heads as we observe page after page of alarming teeth, unfeeling black eyes and fatalities with hunks ripped from their flesh.
The third crucial character is Hooper, an oceanographer, recruited as an consultant, and practical for the movie as he can assert tense information. Brody is certain the beaches must be closed and the shark slaughtered. The mayor plays for time, and then after the shark makes the news, a big reward is proposed, and Amity is teeming with careless fortune seekers. It's here that Spielberg works in one of his most ingenious and chilling visuals for signifying the shark, a pier breaking loose from its quay and floating out to sea. Then turning around and coming back toward shore. Drifting items are employed throughout the movie to evoke the unseen shark. In the central action sequences in the last part, we're frequently looking at kegs and not at a shark, but the idea is so well recognized that the shark is there.
In keeping the Great White off-screen, the man who not long from his work here could buy everyone on Hollywood's Power List was exercising an approach applied by Hitchcock throughout his career, the crucial, often mistaken difference between suspense and surprise. Spielberg uses the shark to suspenseful effect for most of the movie. And the screenplay doesn't loop itself into allegory. The characters all have clear-cut intentions. A little dialogue goes far. Single lines overhang for hard-bitten brevity. The finest scene in the movie is the night scene in the kitchenette, where the men chug brandy and Quint and Hooper equate wounds. Ultimately Quint embarks on a morose monologue, telling the WWII tale of the sinking of the Indianapolis. He was one of its crew. Of the thousand or so, he says, one of the three hundred something still left before rescue came.
Most people seem too caught up to wonder why the shark seems willing to trouble itself so much, at one point even trying to eat the boat. The shark has been so completely determined, through dialogue and somewhat documentary background, that its actual presence is augmented in our minds by all we've absorbed. Also, Spielberg's first smash-hit features rudiments he duplicated in many of his movies. A night sea hunt for the shark presents an early instance of his pet visual trademark, a ray of light made perceptible by smog. He's continued to apply strong concentration on characters, rather than rushing past them to the special effects, as so many '80s and '90s effects directors did. In this watershed tour de force and later, he favors atmosphere over emotional battering, and one of the extraordinary things about the movie is its naturalistically low-key milieu. The recognizable theme by John Williams, which, I dunno, maybe you've heard, is subdued and cunning. It's frequently heard during point-of-view shots, at water level and below, that are another way Spielberg implies the shark without brandishing it. The cinematography, by Bill Butler, is painstakingly marshals the story amidst middle-class America. If Spielberg's preferred location would become the all-American residential communities, Jaws shows his favorite middle-class squatters on vacation.