Deliverance

#2 in my ranking of John Boorman’s films.

If you’ve ever wanted to make a movie where a handful of guys wander around the woods for most of the runtime, I’m not sure you could find a better model than John Boorman’s Deliverance, based on the book and script by James Dickey. Apparently Sam Peckinpah was interested in adapting the book at the time (going to England to film Straw Dogs when he didn’t get the rights), and it would have fit perfectly in with Peckinpah’s body of work, a filmography concerned with the nature and transformative power of violence on men. In Boorman’s hands, the focus seems to shift more towards his “heart of darkness” approach to stories, and he handles it extremely well.

Ed (Jon Voight) is being dragged into the deep wilderness of Georgia by his friend Lewis (Burt Reynolds), something of a survivalist who sees the system that keeps the cities running operating on borrowed time. Ed’s two friends Bobby (Ned Beatty) and Drew (Ronny Cox) also come along for this canoe trip down the river, arranging for a pair of local men to drive their cars down to meet them.

A great thing about the film is how specifically the characters are written. All four are completely distinct, and it goes beyond physical characteristics or Lewis against the other three. This is obvious from the beginning with the famous rendition of “Dueling Banjos” between Drew and a local boy (Billy Redden). Drew reaches out and tries to connect with the locals through music while the other three are different levels of detached from the situation. It is a moment that firmly establishes Drew as the kind of guy who might, say, object to trying to get away with murder of a local, to pick a random circumstance that surely wouldn’t come up later.

The main character is certain Ed, though, and he is just along for the ride in the beginning. As the four get going on the river, after an exciting opening where the four conquer a small set of rapids in their pair of canoes, Lewis asks why Ed comes along on these trips with him with Ed just replying that he likes his comfortable suburban life with his wife and son, but he also just likes going out with Lewis on these trips into the wilds. He’s somewhere in between Lewis and the other two who seems more out of place in the wilds (Bobby being a bigger guy who works as an insurance salesman and the bespeckled Drew). There’s a key moment where, the first morning of their trip, Ed wakes up before anyone else and takes his bow and arrow out to hunt, after Lewis’s display of shooting fish from the canoe the evening before, and he fails to actually loose his arrow on an unsuspecting deer. He’s not ready for real violence. Not yet.

Things go south with the most famous scene in the movie where Ed and Bobby arrive at a shore for a rest ahead of Lewis and Drew. They encounter a pair of local men (Bill McKinney and Herbert Coward) who hold them at gunpoint and sexually assault Bobby with the famous “squeal like a piggie” dialogue (that it was filmed as coverage for television airings and Boorman liked it so much that he used it in the theatrical version tickles me), leading to Lewis saving them by shooting one dead with an arrow through the heart while the other gets away. The movie actually takes its time here to deal with the implications of a murder in a place without law in response to a lawless situation with Lewis and Drew ending up on the opposite sides of the debate, Bobby struggling to find his voice after his assault, and Ed needing to figure out where he stands. It’s the turning point for him, the realization that violence exists outside of the “system” he finds so comfortable. The system is fragile, and when you’re far from it, it has no meaning, especially in situations where life or death decisions come into play.

The rest of the movie is a low-key thriller as the men have to fight the elements and the remaining mountain man who perches himself up on a cliff over them with a gun. When Lewis breaks his leg horribly during a trip down some rapids, it becomes Ed who has to take charge of the situation with a man out there trying to kill them. You can see the transformative power of violence that would attract Peckinpah to the project, and Straw Dogs ends up feeling like an English, indoor version of Deliverance.

Anyway, the film moves in the expected direction with the group getting themselves out of one set of natural trouble only to face the trouble of society looking into their actions, so they lie. This tension between what they had to do in the wilds against the system that they walk back into, complete with its own implied corruption that would punish them for merely surviving a horrible encounter, cuts down the situation to its core, giving the thematic meaning to the action.

I’m not sure what keeps me from saying that the film is great, but I suppose a comparison to my reaction to Straw Dogs might be illuminating. The actual tension and explosion of violence in Peckinpah’s film explores all of the same ideas and also drags me into the action itself at the same time. Ending Deliverance with a delicate dance about where the first canoe got destroyed feels like something of a letdown. The idea is still there, but it’s just not the most compelling packaging of it.

Still, the journey itself is harrowing and thoughtful one. The characters are specifically written and very well acted by everyone involved (I find it amusing that Ronny Cox in his feature film debut plays such an optimist and idealist when I mostly know him for playing such ruthless antagonists in Robocop and Total Recall). Voight anchors the film as Ed, but Reynolds really does have a star-turning role as Lewis. It’s easy to see how he came out the biggest from the film even though he mostly disappears from the film a little after the halfway point.

Boorman returns to form after the expensive flop that was Leo the Last, taking someone else’s story and molding it into his own (reportedly, he and Dickey got into a fist fight on set because Boorman kept changing stuff, a fistfight Boorman lost). He seems to be following a pattern where he tries to make something more standard with his own flourishes (Point Blank and this), followed by more out there projects (Hell in the Pacific and Leo the Last). I wonder how Zardoz is going to turn out…

Rating: 3.5/4