DELIVERANCE

Deliverance


1972 - USA - Adventure Drama/Buddy Film
Best 1,000 Reviewed by Vincent Canby





Type:
Features
Starring Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox, Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight. Directed by John Boorman. (R, 109 minutes).

Adapted from James Dickey's popular novel, John Boorman's 1972 movie recounts the grueling psychological and physical journey taken by four city slickers down a river in the backwoods of Georgia. At the behest of Iron John-esque Lewis (Burt Reynolds), the less adventuresome Ed (Jon Voight), Bobby (Ned Beatty), and Drew (Ronny Cox) agree to canoe down an uncharted section of the river before a dam project ruins the region. After warnings from the grimy, impoverished locals, and Drew's tuneful yet ominous "Dueling Banjos" encounter with a mute inbred boy, the four men embark on their trip, exulting in the beauty of nature and the initial thrill of the rapids. The next day, however, things begin to take a turn for the worse when Bobby and Ed decide to rest on shore after becoming separated from Lewis and Drew. Two rifle-wielding mountain men (Billy McKinney and Herbert "Cowboy" Coward) emerge from the woods, tying up Ed while one of them rapes Bobby and makes him "squeal like a pig." Lewis and Drew rescue them, but the attack irrevocably changes the tenor of the journey. As the river gets rougher and rougher, the men come to nightmarish grips with what it means to survive outside the safety net of "civilization." Shooting on location on the Chattoga River in Georgia, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond captured the appeal and the peril of the river's pristine isolation, enhancing both the adventure's visceral thrills and Dickey's philosophical inquiry into man's true nature. Like such other early '70s Hollywood films as Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971), Deliverance ponders violent instincts and definitions of manhood, ideas made all the more pressing by the period's escalating violence and assault on traditional gender roles. Regardless of these headier concerns, the critically praised realism of the action scenes on the river, with the actors performing a lot of the stunts, helped make the film a hit. Deliverance was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, although Dickey's screenplay of his novel was passed over, as was Reynolds' star-making turn. With its chilling sense of infinite menace, Deliverance spoke to contemporary anxieties over what anyone could do, given the right (or wrong) circumstances. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

By VINCENT CANBY



James Dickey, who won the 1965 National Book Award for poetry and published his first novel, Deliverance, in 1970, has been described as a poet "concerned primarily with the direct impact of experience."

In Deliverance, he attempts to describe the direct impact of the experience of four Atlanta suburbanites—three of whom are less fit for hiking across a steep cornfield than for watching televised football—when they go on a weekend canoe trip that turns into a nightmare of the machismo mind.

Survival, says one of the characters helpfully (at least helpfully for those of us who suffer genetic deficiencies), is the name of the game. Together the members of the party shoot the white water and, individually, are assaulted by a couple of sodomy-inclined hillbillies, scale sheer cliffs using nothing more than what seem to be prehensile fingernails, and fight death duels armed with bow-and-arrow before eventually finding their—well—deliverance.

The problem with the novel is that the perfectly legitimate excitement of the tall story is neutralized by a kind of prose that only Irving Wallace might envy (i.e., "She had great hands; they knew me"). Ordinarily, a film is much better suited than a novel for communicating the direct impact of experience, if only because the experience is immediate and unintellectualized, and you don't have to climb over picturesque semicolons to get from one statement of fact to another.

However, so many of Dickey's lumpy narrative ideas remain in his screenplay that John Boorman's screen version becomes a lot less interesting than it has any right to be. Deliverance, which opened yesterday at Loew's Tower East, is an action melodrama that doesn't trust its action to speak louder than words on the order of: "Sometimes you gotta lose yourself to find something." If anybody said that to me—seriously—in the course of a canoe trip I think I'd get out and wade.

This is a disappointment because the film contains some good things, including the look of the production, which was photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, who did McCabe and Mrs. Miller, entirely on locations in rural Georgia in a kind of bleached color that denies any thoughts of romantic sentimentality. The white water sequences are smashingly vivid and untricky, as is Boorman's treatment of his characters who, much of the time, are kept in a middle distance—one that precludes a phony intimacy with them—until crucial moments when close-ups are necessary.

Best of all are the performances—by Jon Voight, as the thoughtful, self-satisfied businessman who rather surprisingly meets the challenge of the wilderness; Burt Reynolds, as the Hemingway hero who fails, through no real fault of his own, and Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox, as their two city friends whose total unsuitability for such a weekend venture is just one of a number of unbelievable and unexplained points in the Dickey screenplay. I wouldn't get into a Central Park rowboat with either one, but then Dickey's story is schematic, and to make his points about the nature of man he had to deny the very realism that the film pretends to deal in.