Deliverance

Everyone knows what happens in John Boorman's Deliverance (1972).  My daughter had never seen the film and so I watched it with her. (She was appalled by it after about twenty minutes and took a bath so she wouldn't even have to hear what was happening on screen.)  I believe I saw the picture in a movie theater when it was first released.  The DVD version that I watched had been "formatted" to "better fit your TV screen" -- this was when TV screens were oblong rectangles about two feet tall and three feet wide.  As a result the image was badly mutilated and some of the scenes didn't make a whole lot of sense -- in particular, a scene in which Jon Voight, playing the mild-mannered Ed Gentry, pursues a deer was incoherent with half of the image missing:  Ed wanders around wide-eyed but we can't figure out why because we don't see the deer he's chasing at the edge of the frame.  Boorman crafted the film to make the ominous presence of the woods and river an ever-present force in the imagery -- this effect is lost if half of the image is hacked-off.  (The letter-boxed end-credits show that the film was shot in a very long and narrow Cinemascope aspect ratio.)

In its mangled form, the pictures in the film are primarily close ups or two-shots.  This puts the viewer's focus on the faces and acting -- not an authentic version of the film as directed but interesting.  Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox, playing two of the four men involved in the ill-fated excursion, are effectively naturalistic -- they can be recognized as convincing real-life figures.  Burt Reynolds can't act -- he mouths a few threats and platitudes and, then, seems relieved when his fractured femur reduces him to grunting and screaming in pain.  His performance is completely introverted, insular -- in a perverse way, this is effective:  Reynold's part carries the burden of Dickey's macho attitudinizing, the least attractive part of the film today and, indeed, an aspect of the narration that Boorman instinctively opposed and seems to have fought to subvert.  Reynolds is inert and out of his depth, but it doesn't matter because his character is written as emotionally and intellectually limited.  Boorman is one of the great poets of the cinema and he has directed Voight's Ed Gentry "poetically" -- Voight acts broadly, uses expressionistic gestures, and, frequently, seems to over-act:  he's like Lillian Gish stranded between brutish method-actors.  But it's highly effective.  Voight is our eyes on the action, he affords the film with its first-person narration, and his melodramatic representations of horror and disgust and fear are integral to the movie and give the film it's raw charge.  (When he's tied with a belt to a tree to watch Ned Beatty's rape, his eyes expand into huge wet globes; at various points, he trembles uncontrollably, cowers, shudders physically; like Tom Hanks' Captain Phillips, he bursts into tears once the peril has passed -- we seem him weeping over his gravy in the boarding house where he is recuperating with Ned Beatty.)  The contrast between Voight's extroverted performance and the involuted, locked-in playing of the others is important to the film's theme:  only Ed Gentry has a soul sufficiently sensitive to be ultimately and decisively affected by the havoc that he witnesses (and in which he participates) during the nightmare weekend canoe trip.  The movie sticks close to Ed's perspective to the point that the prelude imagery showing the construction of the dam that will conceal the macabre evidence of the weekend and the river-rapids themselves under hundreds of feet of water seems a little misguided -- but it's a mistake made at the outset of the film and it doesn't cast a retrospective shadow of the rest of the proceedings.  Boorman wants us to see everything through Ed's eyes.  This explains curious effects:  in one shot, we see Burt Reynolds literally catapulting through the air -- it's a very short scene but a famous one:  it turns up in all trailers and commentaries on the movie.  The shot doesn't really make physical sense in the movie -- there's no height from which Reynold's could plausibly execute this gymnastic dive.  But in the film the image works perfectly as an impressionistic device -- the image conveys something that Voight's Ed Gentry saw out of the corner of his eye, a glimpse of some kind of violent action, and the physical force embodied in the shot makes it plausible that Reynold's character has shattered his femur in the mishap in the river.  This shot shows us how Ed Gentry perceives what is happening, or, even, more profoundly, how he will remember it. 

There is a fundamental incoherence to the film due I think to conflict between Boorman and Dickey.  (Dickey got into a fistfight with Boorman and broke his nose during the production.)  Dickey wanted to show Ed as a "natural-born killer," someone who glories in violence and, in fact, regards the murder that he commits on the river as his "deliverance" from a life of suburban mediocrity.  In Dickey's view, all real men are, at heart, killers and civilization, like the dam that drowns the wild river, merely masks this inner reality.  Clearly, Boorman doesn't accept this viewpoint.  Dickey's Ed Gentry returns to his wife and children, changed and somehow triumphant -- he now understands his true nature.  Boorman's Ed Gentry is traumatized by the events on the river -- the dead hand of the past reaches out to inflict something like post-traumatic stress on him:  in the last scene, we see him awaking from a nightmare about one of the corpses repressed in the river rising from its cold depths.  In an early scene, Gentry can't bring himself to kill a deer.  Of course, Boorman as a master film maker realizes that the man who is too timid to shoot a deer must scale a 200 foot cliff and, then, kill a man at the climax of the movie.  But this climax will be horribly marred if the hero is already, by mere dint of his masculine nature, a warrior and killer.