Jaws

Yup. Four stars. It’s overlong. There’s 10-15 minutes of fluff here that can get cut. The last 50 minutes being all on the boat gets kind of tiresome. And the climax comes out of nowhere. Mostly, though, for me, it just didn’t connect with me as strongly as I know it does other people. And that’s okay. It’s still good, though. This movie has earned its legacy, and I wouldn’t dare try to make a case otherwise. It just didn’t hit me like it hits others, that’s all. But I want to take this time to praise one specific thing about this movie. An aspect of it that I don’t think I’ve seen mentioned anywhere. That aspect is this: while this is a movie directed by Steven Spielberg, this isn’t A Steven Spielberg Movie, and it is all for the better. Every director has signatures that are imprinted on the movies. From Hitchcock to Aronofsky and everywhere in between, directorial style is something that, if you’re a cinephile, you can spot. There is no mistaking a Christopher Nolan movie for a Lloyd Kaufman movie. Spielberg has his own tendencies and habits, like the Spielberg push-in — you know, when a character is staring at something off screen, but isn’t looking at the screen, and the camera slowly pushes in towards that character. But the biggest signature of Spielberg, my opinion, and his biggest weakness, is a dependency on sappy, saccharine, Boomer-aimed nostalgia and sentimentality. You can sort of see it with Raiders, since tha is basically the old film serials done full form, but he pushed in hard with that starting with ET and most everything he’s since. He aims for the heartstrings of a generation and what they remember with dwindling clarity and fond wistfulness, and he plays on it until you feel a sense of magic and wonder, and that’s all you can think of. I find very little honesty or integrity in his movies, because they’re all built around this aesthetic. Nostalgia doesn’t play with me, even when I lived through the period. A movie that lives because of the beating heart of memory doesn’t live on its own. Jaws may be the only movie of his I’ve seen (and to be fair, I haven’t seen them all) that has none of those signatures. This is a Spielberg free of the auteur label, free of being touted as the next generation of filmmaking geniuses, and free of the burdens of delivering A Steven Spielberg Movie. Jaws developed of its own accord. I never once felt like this was designed to be anything other than what it was — a good movie about a killer shark. I don’t even think it fits into the “first blockbuster” label it was retroactively saddled with; this bears nothing in common with the white-knuckle, thrill-a-minute movie escapades of a Star Wars or an Indiana Jones. It is deliberately paced as a drama, not as an action or horror movie. This is the work of an excellent director, but it is not the work of a director elevated to god-like status, it shows in every frame, and it is a better movie for it. I wish we could see more of THIS Spielberg. The one that didn’t believe the hype. The one that just directed movies. As it stands, we have this, and it’s pretty damned good.