Deliverance - the paradox of modern man.
This piece is about six years old but I’m quite pleased with it so I present it here. It will, with some revisions, form the basis of an upcoming DVD Times review.
John Boorman is a master of visual style and his films are full of images which
are hard to forget. Unfortunately, he has often saddled himself with ineffective
scripts which have been weak on dialogue and sometimes lacking sufficient
narrative cohesion. The best example of this is Exorcist 2 The Heretic which
is a wonderful piece of film making as long as you don’t attempt to follow the
plot or listen to what the character are saying to each other. Even a film as
good as Excalibur is constantly dragged down by clunking expository dialogue.
That said, at least Boorman has a truly cinematic vision - he thinks big and
isn’t afraid of making an idiot of himself. This is cinema at its grandest and
most ambitious , and Boorman has the same taste for extravagant follies as
Griffith, Welles and Huston.
Boorman’s best film remains Deliverance, largely because two sensibilities hit
each other straight on and the result is highly effective. James Dickey’s
poetic, ambiguous novel is a perfect match for Boorman’s visual flair - and the
script by Dickey himself is much better than the work Boorman did with the
dreaded Rospoe Pallenberg. The dialogue is terse and convincing, doing the job of revealing the true nature of the story - how man and nature are inextricably linked.
Incidentally, a word about genre. What makes Deliverance fundamentally a horror film is that it confronts deep fears about what might be lying in wait for us beyond the city limits, and suggests that the greatest horror might just be human beings and what they are capable of - and having used this for a stunning scene of
brutality, the accusation is then swung around and levelled at us. It’s a film
about the dark corners of humanity, and as such fits into the genre very nicely.
Let alone the fact that the climb up the bluff in the dark is a classic bit of
horror-suspense, and the central rape scene is shocking and disturbing. Then
there’s the final great image of the hand rising from the water, a classic
horror sign-off.
The plot is simple. Four city dwellers, Ed (Jon Voight), Lewis (Burt Reynolds in
one of his most interesting performances that proves his talent once and for
all), Drew (Ronny Cox) and Bobby (Ned Beatty) take a weekend trip into the
backwoods to canoe down the Cahulawassee river. They look out of place - which they are - and uncomfortable - except for Lewis who is in his element going back to nature and treats everything as a test of his manhood. Their first meeting with the locals is seemingly friendly, as Drew plays “Duellin’ Banjos” with a withdrawn child. However, the scene turns slightly sinister when Drew tries to shake the boy’s hand and is rejected out of hand. Bobby’s reaction is “Give him a couple of bucks”, as if the country was there solely for their entertainment and patronage. Boorman builds an incredibly economic sense of an
alien world, beyond the comprehension of outsiders - little details, like the old woman tending a sick child in a derelict shack, speak volumes, as does the joke scene where Lewis and Ed are unable to find the river - which is, as they are informed by the delighted locals - “Only the biggest fucking river in the State”.
Of course, the river - treacherous, massive, bringer of life and death - is a
metaphor for all the things that the urban lifestyle has shut out of modern
life. Three of the men treat it as a big laugh, but Lewis has the hunter’s
respect for his quarry - he points out that you don’t beat the river. There is
something inexpressibly poignant in the oft-repeated scenes of sand and gravel being pumped into the valley by huge cranes. Something is being lost in contemporary living, and the need for man to capture it before it goes is one of the classic American themes. The irony is that in it’s dying moments, the river proves to be the undoing of the men, as if it is asserting its power once and forever before man attempts to tame it. I’m rambling, but this central theme of loss is central to several of Boorman’s films - remember Lee Marvin unable to comprehend the fact that there is no money to recover in Point Blank, or the story of the end of the age of magic in Excalibur, or the joyous celebration
of childhood in Hope and Glory?
The four men initially enjoy their trip through the rapids - Bobby is patronised
endlessly by Lewis, who calls him “Chubby” and considers him incompetent. But
there are little sinister touches - my favourite is the moment when the men see
the banjo boy standing on the bridge, staring at them emotionlessly. After the
first night rituals - sitting round the campfire, making banal philosophical
statements, singing sentimental songs - Ed goes off to kill an animal, and prove
his manhood to Lewis. We are already aware that Ed is a man of thought rather
than action, although Lewis seems to respect him more than the others. Ed’s
failure to shoot a deer will have a big significance later on, but he seems to
regard it as a failure - the first of two that day.
Ed and Bobby set off in front of the other two men, and travel gently
downstream, stopping for a rest in a shady grove. They see two men weaving in and out of the trees and try to be friendly. But their efforts to communicate are greeted with hostility, and soon the two men, who appear to be hunters, have taken them into a clearing at gunpoint. It has to be said that the two hunters are as frightening as any human monsters ever to appear in a film. True, they appeal to a racist stereotype of hillbilly types, and one of them has the worst teeth in any film set in the recent past. But Bill McKinney - a fine actor wasted in too many identical roles, but watch his lovely comic turn in Bronco Billy and admire his subtle wit - is genuinely terrifying; self-righteous, determined, brutal, he decides to teach the city dwellers a lesson they won’t forget. He compares Bobby to a boar, having forced him to strip, and after riding him declares “He’s not a boar, he’s a sow” and forces him to squeal. Bobby’s efforts prove unsatisfying, and so McKinney declares he will give him a reason to squeal and then rapes him. It’s a horrible sequence with a queasy fascination, and Beatty is brilliant in it. Going beyond the call of duty, his face registers genuine terror and pain and humiliation - we sense that jolly, fat Bobby has had more than his share of humiliation in his life and feels that this is the living end. Boorman refuses to show the rape in any detail, focusing on close-ups of Beatty’s face, and then cutting to Ed, who has been strapped to a tree. At least one writer has called the scene homophobic, but I don’t think it is. There’s no suggestion that McKinney is homosexual, but there is strong suggestion that he is on a power trip and is using Bobby in the most degrading way he can contemplate. Finally finishing with Bobby, he cuts Ed loose and discusses with his toothy pal what to do, whereupon toothy utters the immortal line, “He’s got a real pretty mouth ain’t he.” Before Ed is forced to “pray” for
the men at gunpoint, Lewis arrives - in a rather convenient nick-of-time manner - and shoots an arrow through McKinney’s chest. Toothy runs off, pursued by an oar-waving Drew, and McKinney dies in a protracted, painful manner. There’s a lengthy argument about what should be done with him, Drew insisting that they should tell the police about what happened. Drew’s naivety is punished a short time later, but he is outvoted by the others who decide to bury McKinney by the river, where he will be covered when the dam is built.
There follows a dangerous trip down the rapids by the men, who are now terrified and just want to get back to civilisation. But Drew is suddenly pitched out of the canoe by some force - possibly a gun shot - and Lewis is thrown into the river, seriously injuring himself. Drew vanishes and Lewis has to be ferried along in the remaining canoe - one having been rendered useless by the force of the water. Lewis then passes the responsibility for saving them to Ed, saying, “Now it’s your turn to play the game”. Interesting statement, as if it’s all somehow happening in a safe environment where they can leave and find each other undamaged by the experience. Interesting too that Drew is the one to be killed, since it was he who thought he could link with the backwoods at the start with the duet. Perhaps he is punished for his over-confidence ?
Ed, concerned that he could neither kill the deer nor save Bobby from being assaulted, decides to scale the bluff to find the surviving hunter, who is up there with a gun and seems to have picked off Drew. He climbs up at night, in a terrifying ascent which seems to last forever. Voight did his own climbing - the picture was apparently uninsured because of the dangers - and it’s obvious that the actor as well as the character is discovering new sides to his personality. Upon reaching the top, Ed is slightly awed by looking down at the power of nature, realising the mens’ insignificance. He manages, after a night’s sleeping, to shoot an arrow through the tormentor, although again the death is horrible and messy. Ed barely escapes with his life after falling into the water, and the dead body is left in the river, the hope being that it will just disappear. The three remaining men find Drew’s body, and take it back with them, hoping to explain it away as an accident. However, and this is the key point in the film, when they get back to civilisation, they can’t just leave the river and their experiences behind. Ed and Bobby are more nervous, more aggressive. Bobby’s beaming self-confidence vanishes, and the two men come to blows over the story they have to tell the police. The performances here are, again, incredibly subtle, especially that of Voight, who manages to appear completely
neurotic without going over the top.
The final touch in the film is the attitude of the Sheriff - played by James Dickey. His deputy turns out to be McKinney’s brother in law, and wants the men to be held for questioning, but the Sheriff’s attitude is more complex. He doesn’t quite let on whether he knows the truth or not, but he warns Ed never to return to the place, and he means it. The final scene is justly famous - a beautiful vista of the river surrounded by forest, suddenly interrupted when a hand rises out of the water. Again, the metaphor is obvious. You can bury the past, but you can’t destroy it. The dream haunts Ed and we sense, despite his return to his nice, comfortable life, that it always will. Ed has, after all,
revealed his true nature - behind the bourgeois trappings, he is just as much of a primitive as anyone else, and is capable of anything in the name of self-preservation.
The incredibly beautiful and evocative photography of the river and environs, by the great Vilmos Zsigmond, is intentionally at odds with the bloody, violent story and is probably the least subtle paradox in the film. But this is the best film about the clash between urban and rural culture, and it raises disturbing questions about whether there can be cultural hegemony in a place where everything is eventually reduced down to primitivism. The film is interesting because it doesn’t patronise the backwoods people, showing instead how the town people can’t understand a way of life which is so alien to them. That theme is also examined in Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort, which is more exciting and less thoughtful. Also integral to the film is the need of modern man to find and master the beast within himself - Lewis asks Ed why, if he is so happy, he feels the need to go on these weekends - contrasted with the impossibility of ever putting the beast back in the box once you have let it out. In subduing the elemental - represented by the dam - modern man, at the same time, wants to embrace it. It’s this paradox which makes Deliverance so difficult to forget.