Superficial

By Noel Vera

MOVIE REVIEW
The Shallows
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

IT’S THE SUMMER silly season so what can be sillier and more summery than a shark movie? The premise is clever enough — young woman goes to an isolated beach to surf, finds herself alone and stalked by large predator.

Anthony Jaswinski’s script had two directions to go: small as in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (beach community slowly realizes they have a shark problem; three men on a boat go out and hunt the said shark) or big as in Deep Blue Sea (not the gorgeous Terence Davies film but the silly Renny Harlin potboiler, complete with genetically enhanced sharks). Jaswinski goes microscopic, discarding all the Moby Dick metaphors to focus on a girl, a seagull, a rock, and a shark — nothing more nothing less.

Well maybe a little more: we get Nancy (Blake Lively) in casual conversation with local resident Carlos (Oscar Jaenada) who was nice enough to give her a ride; apparently Nancy is seeking a beach her mother visited long ago, where she realized she was pregnant with her daughter (when Nancy asks in turn the name of the beach, Carlos is coy with his answer “it’s paradise”). We get an information-heavy phone call to dad (Brett Cullen) filling in more backstory: apparently her mother had just passed away, and Nancy is reconsidering med school. Dad tries to talk her out of dropping out; she begs off instead, hanging up.

So far so ho-hum. The movie finally takes off when Nancy finally takes to the water, and director Jaume Collet-Sera wows us with his take on surfing: the camera diving in and out of towering waves like a porpoise, demonstrating the slow-motion beauty of bodies (particularly Lively’s body) suspended in water, intercut with breathtaking overhead shots of the entire bay in hallucinogenic colors — deep aquamarine, livid magenta, phosphorescent chartreuse, dappled with foam. The picture’s high point far as I’m concerned, staged shot and edited to make me want to rush out in a board and wipe out in the water.

Then of course death crashes the party in the form of a humpback whale carcass. Clever way to account for the great Great White cruising nearby (otherwise it’s a bit of a puzzler why the shark — which swims in California, Northeast United States, South Africa and Australia — is hanging around a Mexican beach) but the whale also raises a whole other question: why forego this tasty properly wet-aged all-you-can-eat buffet of rich blubber and meat for a skin-and-bones surfer who would hardly make up a satisfying snack?

I know I know I know — it’s a summer movie, not Ingmar Bergman; you’re not supposed to use your brains when watching. That said, I find myself asking pesky questions when I’m not distracted — when the onscreen action isn’t engaging enough to keep me from applying logic to a patently illogical story.

And that, I suppose, is my biggest beef with this fish tale: it doesn’t really engage you beyond the surface beauty of Mexican beach and wave (actually Lord Howe Island in New South Wales, Australia — which brings up the disturbing idea that one tropical beach paradise looks pretty much like the other). Blake Lively is buff, superbly up to the physical rigors of her role (sprint swimming, evasive diving, marathon clinging to both rock and decayed whale meat, excessive to the point of melanoma sunbathing) but no one has written her sufficiently entertaining patter to accompany the role.

It helps; it helps enormously. The genre might be said to have started all the way back with Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (that or Jack London’s “To Build a Fire,” or before that Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe). Hemingway was cunning enough to realize the company of a single human isn’t enough, you need dialogue or talk of some kind. His eponymous elder talks incessantly and delivers all kinds of amusingly naive philosophical musings in carefully stilted English (Defoe for his part has his protagonist tell the story in an epistolary manner, through diary entries, and eventually throws in a Friday for actual company). Spielberg’s Jaws is lucky enough to include three men, two of which engaged in a hilarious game of one-upsmanship (the inherently dramatic Robert Shaw, constantly mocked and parodied [with the encouragement of the director] by the nimbler Richard Dreyfus).

Lively alas is by herself; worse she’s not much of a talker; worse still she’s not very funny when she does talk. At one point a lame seagull lands on the rock she’s clinging to and she starts calling it “Steven” — for better or worse the comic high point of the picture.

Collet-Sera didn’t enjoy the same big break Spielberg did when his shark (affectionately named Bruce) broke down in the middle of shooting; deprived of his expensive robot toy Spielberg had no choice but to improvise, drawing on among other Jack Arnold’s The Creature From the Black Lagoon to suggest rather than show, allow his monster’s presence to build in our minds before revealing all 25 feet and three tons of the creature in a high overhead shot. The shark in this production (unnamed far as I can tell and lacking Bruce’s charisma) pops up early, is obviously digital, and wouldn’t scare a canned mackerel. As fish stories go this one smells at least a week old.

MTRCB Rating: PG