You May Want To Let That Breathe

Having appropriated a cliched husband/wife exchange ('How was your day?' 'Swell.') as an ironic greeting, Hooper claims Brody's uneaten meal and then nearly chokes on a forkful of food at Ellen's awkward attempt to start a conversation ('My husband tells me you're in sharks.') The light comedic tone of the scene is further established by Hooper's unlikely tale of how he first became interested in marine life. In describing his encounter with 'a four and a half foot baby thresher shark', he delivers an Indianapolis-lite monologue, deliberately playing it for laughs ('He turned an inboard into an outboard.'), which Ellen supplies as a dutiful hostess. Even when he segues into a more serious discussion of Amity's 'shark problem', the playful tone is preserved by the business of Brody pouring the wine - half a pint into his still-unfinished tumbler of scotch and then a splash for his wife and guest - and ignoring Hooper's sommelier advice.

Just as the early scene on the ferry anticipates the later confrontation between Hooper, Brody and Vaughn in front of the defaced billboard, so this dinner table scene acts as a companion piece to the moment on board the Orca when Hooper and Quint compare scars. Both scenes involve an uneaten meal, a trio of characters, one of whom is sidelined (at the dinner table, Ellen; on board the Orca, Brody), a story of an encounter with sharks (one comic, one tragic), and a shift from light-hearted banter to a darker tone. Even the way both scenes are shot (with the compositions framing two of the characters together whilst isolating the third) seem to echo each other.

Unlike the wine, the dinner table scene is allowed to breathe, with Spielberg letting the actors play out little pieces of business that lend it a sense of verisimilitude. Whilst Dreyfuss has the more showy role with his wisecracks and smirks and Lorraine Gary takes up the sentimental slack (a speech she makes about baby seals was excised from the final cut, but is available as a deleted scene), it is Scheider who once again owns the screen, peeling away at the wine bottle's cap and ever so slightly slurring his carefully considered words. The interplay between himself and Dreyfuss has a fresh improvisational feel to it, and the latter's reading of the line 'It's just a theory that I happen to agree with' is beautifully modulated.

The scene ends with Brody reasserting his authority ('I can do anything. I'm the chief of police'.) as he sinks the remainder of his wine. Is it too much to see in this act an echo of the famous moment in Rio Bravo when Dean Martin pours the whisky back into the bottle as a sign that he is taking up his responsibilities again? Certainly, the entire scene owes something to the group bonding scenes of so many Howard Hawkes movies, with its overlapping dialogue, ironic needling and bravado humour.