DELIVERANCE
Directed by John Boorman
Written by James Dickey and John Boorman
Starring Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox
Released 1972
Directed by John Boorman
Written by James Dickey and John Boorman
Starring Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox
Released 1972
When I first watched the movie Deliverance (1972), I found myself uncomfortable for all the wrong reasons. I felt the representation of the backwoods people of Georgia carried with it a weighty load of bigotry and that given what the James Dickey novel and the film made out to be the devastation that awaited their primitive community, it was unnecessary to offer those people up as inbred genetic mutations, one of whom happened to be quite handy with a banjo. The whole idea of the movie bugged me and as I went into the next series of director John Boorman's films I was predisposed to dislike them with some intensity.
Well, The Exorcist II and Excalibur were pretty dreadful and while my own prejudice against all things Boorman did not improve my opinions of those movies, it would not have mattered much if I had believed JB to be the cousin of the Second Coming.
And that's funny because his first two films, Catch Us If You Can and Point Blank were just fine little pictures, the former being sort of a rip off of A Hard Day's Night (featuring the Dave Clark Five) and the latter being more or less about the decay of Alcatraz and the ascendance of hippie.
But back to Deliverance, I will admit that the celebration of machismo as an alternative to mechanistic society irritated me during my first viewing. In short, I considered the whole thing to be a sexist load of pig swill. It didn't matter to me that Burt Reynolds gave the performance of a life time and years later admitted that this was his personal favorite of all the movies in which he had appeared. It made no difference that Jon Voight climbed that ragged cliff himself because the producers didn't want to spend the money on stunt doubles, much less on insurance for their stars, so if he had fallen and broken something, it would have been bad news all around; and that does not even get into the magnificence of his measured performance. After all, it is Voight's eyes through which we witness this terrifying and beautiful narrative and so his reactions and expressions had to be more than convincing--they had to exorcise demons, something they certainly did. I did not care that this was the first film appearance of Ned Beatty, a man who would go on to perform in more than one hundred movies, every time out getting so deep into the character that he went beyond mere acting and into some kind of nether world where one metamorphoses into something bigger than the role itself, hell, bigger than the movie, grander than the studio. I did not care much one way or another that Ronny Cox was in the movie and while everything I have heard in the years since then suggests him to have been a very nice fellow, I never could get the image out of my head of him as the patriarch in the TV show "The Appletons." I cared not at all that the James Dickey novel would be listed by dozens of magazines and journals as one of the best books of the twentieth century. Nope, I just did not give one good old fashioned damn about any of that.
I can be quite hard headed at times.
Yet something about Deliverance kept pulling at me. I kept thinking of Lewis (Burt Reynolds) asking Ed (Jon Voight), "Why do you keep going on these adventures with me?"
"I wonder about that myself sometimes, Lewis."
Why did I continue to make myself watch a movie such as this every so often, knowing full well that the story itself represented all the things I believed I had outgrown or abandoned?
Because my opinion of this movie has changed so dramatically, I now believe that it is a very good thing to be able to claim for oneself a degree of flexibility in one's assessment of an example of a major art form, whereas earlier I might have considered such alterations to be waffling or indecision.
It turns out, to my delight, that Deliverance transcends whatever wrongheadedness may be its lot in life, or mine, for that matter. It transcends its own internal logic in the sense that this is not specifically, or perhaps merely, a movie about four guys taking a canoe trip down a river and encountering some adversities they must conquer. So the accouterments about incest and rotten teeth don't matter one bit because they could just as easily have been about anacondas taking over the temples of Tibet. The villains in the movie were forces rather than people. They were obstacles placed in the way of the urban suburban golfers on their way through a survivalist paradise. Everything safe and reassuring in their establishment lives gets distorted, then perverted, then banished from their consciousness. Truth, justice, democracy--it's all irrelevant when you are part of an organism that holds its own survival as the paramount creed.
The last thing I want is to come off sounding like some sort of militia type. I have nothing whatsoever good to say about tax-dodging secessionists who believe in the government only when its male, white and local. Industry and government may have come down on our heads, blown a waft of cannabis in our faces to fool us into believing we are free while assassinating our few honest inspirations. In short, the bad guys may indeed have the good guys surrounded and supplies might just be running out, but my idea of utopia has nothing to do with spearing fish, stockpiling dry goods and taking on multiple wives while the fumes of the apocalypse dance by on a rusty merry-go-round. I like what we have come to call civilization, even its jungle aspects. I like a certain amount of hustle and bustle, a certain opposing stagnation, a degree of bureaucracy. I like even the conflict that comes from cooperation and vice versa. I sure as hell do not want to revert to digging with a stick. But I cannot deny the simultaneous appeal of the harshest elements of nature: be it a monstrous tornado, a blizzard, a rocky river, or an old tin shed that contains who knows what kind of abomination. These, for me, are all things to appreciate from a certain safe perspective, such as the comfort of a movie theatre.
That brings us to the fact of the raw beauty of this movie. When I say "raw," I mean that by the time the four men get through the first white rapids, you check your own face to see if you got all the water off. The majesty of the scenery, which, we are reminded, will be under water--"drowning a river" is how they put it--in a few weeks, is not only breathtaking, it is heartbreaking. Nature just does not care about the alpha male and his friends. All it cares about is surviving. Nature's very indifference creates an uncredited silent actor. There is never any doubt about who is in charge.
So my initial lack of comfort with this movie turns out to have been ill-advised. And while my disapproval of most films by John Boorman remains valid, if all he had ever done was to direct this one movie, he would have earned whatever accolades one might care to bestow.
Well, The Exorcist II and Excalibur were pretty dreadful and while my own prejudice against all things Boorman did not improve my opinions of those movies, it would not have mattered much if I had believed JB to be the cousin of the Second Coming.
And that's funny because his first two films, Catch Us If You Can and Point Blank were just fine little pictures, the former being sort of a rip off of A Hard Day's Night (featuring the Dave Clark Five) and the latter being more or less about the decay of Alcatraz and the ascendance of hippie.
But back to Deliverance, I will admit that the celebration of machismo as an alternative to mechanistic society irritated me during my first viewing. In short, I considered the whole thing to be a sexist load of pig swill. It didn't matter to me that Burt Reynolds gave the performance of a life time and years later admitted that this was his personal favorite of all the movies in which he had appeared. It made no difference that Jon Voight climbed that ragged cliff himself because the producers didn't want to spend the money on stunt doubles, much less on insurance for their stars, so if he had fallen and broken something, it would have been bad news all around; and that does not even get into the magnificence of his measured performance. After all, it is Voight's eyes through which we witness this terrifying and beautiful narrative and so his reactions and expressions had to be more than convincing--they had to exorcise demons, something they certainly did. I did not care that this was the first film appearance of Ned Beatty, a man who would go on to perform in more than one hundred movies, every time out getting so deep into the character that he went beyond mere acting and into some kind of nether world where one metamorphoses into something bigger than the role itself, hell, bigger than the movie, grander than the studio. I did not care much one way or another that Ronny Cox was in the movie and while everything I have heard in the years since then suggests him to have been a very nice fellow, I never could get the image out of my head of him as the patriarch in the TV show "The Appletons." I cared not at all that the James Dickey novel would be listed by dozens of magazines and journals as one of the best books of the twentieth century. Nope, I just did not give one good old fashioned damn about any of that.
I can be quite hard headed at times.
Yet something about Deliverance kept pulling at me. I kept thinking of Lewis (Burt Reynolds) asking Ed (Jon Voight), "Why do you keep going on these adventures with me?"
"I wonder about that myself sometimes, Lewis."
Why did I continue to make myself watch a movie such as this every so often, knowing full well that the story itself represented all the things I believed I had outgrown or abandoned?
Because my opinion of this movie has changed so dramatically, I now believe that it is a very good thing to be able to claim for oneself a degree of flexibility in one's assessment of an example of a major art form, whereas earlier I might have considered such alterations to be waffling or indecision.
It turns out, to my delight, that Deliverance transcends whatever wrongheadedness may be its lot in life, or mine, for that matter. It transcends its own internal logic in the sense that this is not specifically, or perhaps merely, a movie about four guys taking a canoe trip down a river and encountering some adversities they must conquer. So the accouterments about incest and rotten teeth don't matter one bit because they could just as easily have been about anacondas taking over the temples of Tibet. The villains in the movie were forces rather than people. They were obstacles placed in the way of the urban suburban golfers on their way through a survivalist paradise. Everything safe and reassuring in their establishment lives gets distorted, then perverted, then banished from their consciousness. Truth, justice, democracy--it's all irrelevant when you are part of an organism that holds its own survival as the paramount creed.
The last thing I want is to come off sounding like some sort of militia type. I have nothing whatsoever good to say about tax-dodging secessionists who believe in the government only when its male, white and local. Industry and government may have come down on our heads, blown a waft of cannabis in our faces to fool us into believing we are free while assassinating our few honest inspirations. In short, the bad guys may indeed have the good guys surrounded and supplies might just be running out, but my idea of utopia has nothing to do with spearing fish, stockpiling dry goods and taking on multiple wives while the fumes of the apocalypse dance by on a rusty merry-go-round. I like what we have come to call civilization, even its jungle aspects. I like a certain amount of hustle and bustle, a certain opposing stagnation, a degree of bureaucracy. I like even the conflict that comes from cooperation and vice versa. I sure as hell do not want to revert to digging with a stick. But I cannot deny the simultaneous appeal of the harshest elements of nature: be it a monstrous tornado, a blizzard, a rocky river, or an old tin shed that contains who knows what kind of abomination. These, for me, are all things to appreciate from a certain safe perspective, such as the comfort of a movie theatre.
That brings us to the fact of the raw beauty of this movie. When I say "raw," I mean that by the time the four men get through the first white rapids, you check your own face to see if you got all the water off. The majesty of the scenery, which, we are reminded, will be under water--"drowning a river" is how they put it--in a few weeks, is not only breathtaking, it is heartbreaking. Nature just does not care about the alpha male and his friends. All it cares about is surviving. Nature's very indifference creates an uncredited silent actor. There is never any doubt about who is in charge.
So my initial lack of comfort with this movie turns out to have been ill-advised. And while my disapproval of most films by John Boorman remains valid, if all he had ever done was to direct this one movie, he would have earned whatever accolades one might care to bestow.
