Toothless

So hey, about the Jaws play I mentioned seeing last week. Unsurprisingly, Glenn summed it all up pretty well in his NOW review; The Shark Is Broken - now playing at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto - just sort of sits there, a weird attempt at IP-adjacent theatre that’s content to reaffirm the audience’s affection for a thing without really exploring it or their feelings for it. The real story about the making of Jaws is far more interesting, and if you want to about it just watch any of the half-dozen documentaries about it, or read Carl Gottlieb’s invaluable book, or listen to me and Paul Sun-hyung Lee talk about it on his episode of Someone Else’s Movie.

I just love Jaws a lot, and it’s disappointing to watch people spend all this time and money on a thing that doesn’t understand it. Yes, you can frame it as a fanciful look at the way the offscreen relationship between Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss evolved into the dynamic between Brody, Quint and Hooper – but that’s a really reductive read on the thing. The play acknowledges the existence of Peter Benchley’s novel; there’s even a joke about “Steven” having told Dreyfuss not to read it because it’ll just confuse him. (See, Hooper has an affair with Ellen Brody in the novel, a trivia point explained at length a few minutes later.)

Yeah, about Dreyfuss: Yes, the guy playing him can do a perfect mimic of Hooper’s enthusiastic “Tiger shark!” line, but the play doesn’t ask him to do anything else. Perhaps tellingly, The Shark Is Broken frames Dreyfuss as a needy, coked-up idiot in contrast to Shaw’s irritated professional, with Scheider constantly trying to keep the peace between them; yes, I know Shaw’s son Ian co-wrote it and plays his own father as a tragic, self-aware alcoholic, but Dreyfuss couldn’t have afforded the coke habit he’s depicted as having until after Jaws opened. But most people vaguely remember he had a drug problem, right? So here it is. Also, Roy Scheider had a much more interesting life than the self-effacing Martin Brody, something the play doesn’t even seen to know.

It’s little things like that, along with the incessant jokes about how this movie’s going to be a disaster no one will remember in fifty years’ time, that ground me down over the course of 90 very long minutes. I wanted to like this thing; I wanted to get some insight into Shaw from his kid, if nothing else. But it’s just cosplay, which the show acknowledges by ending with a pitch-perfect recreation of the Indianapolis monologue, which Shaw is shown to be working on for weeks while everyone else just sits around kibitzing.

Shaw the younger is a dead ringer in costume, and he gets his father’s accent down, but it just left me thinking how much more effective the monologue was in the movie because a) we genuinely care about Quint’s backstory and b) Steven Spielberg let Shaw play most of it in close-up. The Shark Is Broken is just one endless master shot – and not a terribly compelling one, either.

Anyway, the Jaws 4K disc is splendid and if you don’t already have it on your shelf I’m mad at you. But I will swallow my anger and direct you to the digital TIFF Bell Lightbox platform, where it’s available for rent along with a number of Steven Spielberg’s other films. See? I made it about movies after all!

Also new to digital.tiff.net – and to physical media, even – is Dean Fleischer-Camp’s wonderful Marcel, The Shell With Shoes On, which I reviewed in this very newsletter earlier this year, and which you should watch as soon as you can. It’s a precious and beautiful thing, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the Blu-ray so I can revisit it and listen to the commentary track.

In Sunday’s paid edition: An Australian label is doing the lord’s work with catalogue titles – and making sure they’re playable in every region. Curious? You should be! Upgrade your subscription, dammit!