Sorry to say that “The Shallows” has made itself too easy a target with its title: it stays all too close to the surface of its story, a young woman’s pure physical struggle to survive while confronting a shark at an isolated beach. Since the young woman, Nancy Adams, is played by a star, Blake Lively, it seems a foregone conclusion that she’ll survive the ordeal, and the only question is how—or, rather, what credibility-straining heroics and cinematic shock effects the director, Jaume Collet-Serra, will cram into the story of her survival.
Lively’s stardom is at the heart of the film. She’s one of the best, and worst-deployed, younger actors, and a sign of the movie’s weakness is that the exact same story with the exact same derring-do probably wouldn’t have had different, or less, emotional energy in the incarnation of other actors. Lively conveys a sense of floating outside of time, blending the enduring with the elusive, which is why she was so well cast in “The Age of Adaline,” a time-travel melodrama of sorts that makes much of her natural air of slightly distracted loftiness.
Collet-Serra (working with a script by Anthony Jaswinski) builds that note into the setup of “The Shallows”: Nancy, a woman of about twenty-five, is travelling to a remote Mexican beach that meant a lot to her mother, who has died (seemingly of cancer) and whom she’s mourning. Despairing of the efficacy of medicine and the usefulness of exertion, Nancy has dropped out of medical school; this sentimental journey to Mexico is meant as the first uncertain step in a new life. She’s driven to the beach by a local man named Carlos (Óscar Jaenada), who teases her about gazing at her cell phone while surrounded by splendid landscapes (she admits, “Yes, I’m American”) and who asks her earnestly how she intends to get back from the remote site (she responds, flippantly, “Uber”). Yet once that note is sounded, near the start, it goes undeveloped throughout the rest of the film.
The family backstory is conveyed efficiently, at beachside, by Nancy’s smart-phone screen, which is impressively superimposed on the seascape, dominating half the movie screen, as she talks with her younger sister (Sedona Legge) and her father (Brett Cullen) and looks at pictures of her mother in good and bad times. When Nancy takes to the waves, she gets coached on the peculiarities of the area by a pair of local surfers, who explain that there’s one low tide, which turns a small underwater rock formation into a miniature island. It’s only after those two men leave the beach, of course, that danger strikes. Nancy finds refuge first atop a whale carcass, and then on that pile of rocks. But because that safe ground is soon to be submerged again, leaving her prey to the marauding shark, she needs to find another stronghold, and plots a dangerous swim to a nearby buoy (no spoiler here—it’s in the trailer).
Almost the entire movie spotlights the practical and material details of Nancy’s struggle to survive. It conveniently features her talking aloud to herself to illuminate the reasoning behind some of her potentially more obscure maneuvers, but the best of the scant talk that Nancy indulges in while alone on the rock involves her medical knowledge and experience, which, as the opportunity presents itself, she divulges with a confident professionalism that’s at odds with the urgency of her circumstances.
Those moments offer a glimpse at what’s missing throughout the movie: subjectivity. There’s an intrinsic fascination to the wiles and the courage that it takes to survive a shark attack, but there’s a deeper and stranger story in what passes through the mind of a person facing such an attack. The movie runs just under an hour and a half; the events it covers run just less than forty-eight hours; and most of the time that Nancy spends on the rock doesn’t involve actual physical action. Through Nancy’s imagination—her memories, her fantasies, the great moments in life that she recalls, the trivial ones that come back to her with a vast amount of emotional energy, the things she plans to do or not do if she survives—we might see that the story of looming death is also the story of a life. I had hoped that the filmmakers would confront the subject of danger as a premise for delving into the marrow of Nancy’s life as it is exposed, perhaps for the first time, and as she acknowledges its deepest substance, perhaps for the first time, while confronting her first experience of existential fear. Collet-Serra films the story of Nancy’s survival of a shark attack without ever wondering what constitutes the story. He depicts that battle with care and cleverness but without imagining that what goes through a person’s mind is as real, as constitutive of the action, as what’s visible from the outside.
For that matter, even the constant attention to the material circumstances of the action is realized without any particular visual imagination (with the unique exception of a very brief but wild scene involving flames), without any personal or inventive approach to Nancy’s physical struggles. Filming with an obstinate connection to her point of view (never showing anything that she wouldn’t be aware of), or abstaining entirely from her point of view and placing the action in the context of the entire beach and its locale, or, for that matter, drastically shifting the point of view of the action throughout, to take advantage of the perspectives that the situation both imposes and allows—anything resembling a visual thought process beyond mere depiction would have opened the emotions of the drama into a new dimension of inner experience, and would have made more effective use of even the mere presence of Lively in the frame.
Lively is perhaps the great melodramatic actress of the current time, but she’s still awaiting her Douglas Sirk. I can think of several candidates, including Amy Seimetz, Alex Ross Perry, and Nathan Silver, who have made exemplary modernist melodramas. I hope to see her appear in films directed by them and other leading, younger filmmakers—filmmakers of discovery, who don’t presume to know what a story is in advance but whose process of filmmaking poses, en route, the question of what the cinema is. Because the history of movie-making shows that it’s only the fruitful synergy of direction and performance that leads movie actors to display the most original and distinctive aspects of their personae.
