Rites of Passage

DELIVERANCE

Directed by JOHN BOORMAN Screenplay by JAMES DICKEY

For three of the four men, the trip into the wilderness is something of a lark. For Lewis (Burt Reynolds) it is a ritual and a trial. He tells his best friend Ed, played by Jon Voight: "Machines are gonna fail. The system's gonna fail. And then--survival."

As the men leave their safe city homes for a weekend of canoeing down a wild Georgia river, Lewis says: "They're raping the whole goddamned landscape." It seems that the unspoiled countryside gliding past their car windows will soon be gone, after engineers dam the river and change it into a broad, still lake. Haphazard at first, the expedition soon becomes a horror. It is nature in all its untamable force that finally rapes man.

There is a sense of uneasiness from the outset. Bobby (Ned Beatty), fattest and least fit of the group, takes one look around the deep woods and says: "I think this is where everything finishes up." The country folk are suspicious, violent, many inbred to the point of idiocy. They watch the city men like weasels guarding a burrow.

The river, nature itself, is seen as a malign force. At first, shooting some easy rapids gives the men a small sense of triumph. "We beat it, we beat it, didn't we?" Ed shouts. Lewis knows better. "You don't beat it," he says evenly. "You don't beat this river." Next day, the river separates the men for a time. Ed and Bobby go ashore and are set upon by two mountaineers. Ed is tied to a tree, Bobby sodomized at gunpoint. They are only saved from further humiliation by the arrival of Lewis, who kills one of the mountain men with a bow and arrow while the other runs off.

The canoeists have grown gradually more isolated from their smug idea of civilization. This episode of brutality and reprisal severs what few connections remain. Drew (Ronny Cox), the most rational of the four, wants to bring the murdered mountaineer downriver to the police. He believes that they will all be pardoned for justifiable homicide. The others doubt it, finally overrule him, and bury the body in the woods, which along with the rest of the area will be flooded for the dam project.

As they set off again, Drew falls from his canoe and is lost in the roiling water. Then Lewis spills out in rapids and suffers a bad break in his leg. It is up to Ed, the most hesitant of them, to save Bobby and the crippled Lewis. To do this, he must become an animal, beginning by scaling a high cliff and killing the mountaineer who may be waiting for them in ambush.

The film that John Boorman has fashioned from James Dickey's novel is a magnificent visual experience and an assault on the senses fully as brutal as the river trip. Boorman (Point Blank, Hell in the Pacific) has made the river and the woods characters in themselves.

Rarely, except in Robert Flaherty's documentaries, has nature been so truly or so tangibly rendered on the screen. Deliverance is splendidly photographed (by Vilmos Zsigmond) and edited (by Tom Priestley). Images sweep by the eye in great, violent cascades that transcend Dickey's prose renderings of the same terrain.

The script by Boorman and Dickey (who does nicely in the role of a small town sheriff) strays occasionally on the side of overemphasis. But an unrelenting pulse of suspense propels the film over these obstacles.

Each of the four lead performances is exceptional, none more so than Burt Reynolds' beefy, supercilious Lewis.

Much of the effect of the movie rests finally on Jon Voight's Ed. Initially withdrawn and uncertain, the characterization takes on strength and clarity as Ed becomes more crucial to the story. Voight captures Ed's turmoil, his spiritual and physical agonies, in a way that confirms his standing as one of our finest young actors.

Voight's performance also crystallizes the most dubious aspect of the movie. Is Ed really any more of a man for enduring and surviving as he does?

Is he really more in touch with his own dark spirituality? Here, as in Sam Peckinpah's recent Straw Dogs -- another, artistically less successful movie about a test -- the director's prodigious skill cannot conceal a rather shabby and cynical intellectual construct. In Deliver ance, man must become one with na ture in order to survive. But for Boorman and Dickey, becoming one apparently means becoming bestial. Deliverance comes not through a knowledge of nature's most primitive and powerful forces but through a capitulation to them.

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