Deliverance 1972

[3.95/5] Deliverance posits that something is being lost out there, that as “progress” slowly but surely encroaches on the natural world, something beautiful if untamable is being left behind or destroyed. The old ways of man are being forgotten, it seems to say, bulldozed and flooded and paved over, and in their place, we erect something lesser.

There’s an irony there, because to the modern eye, Deliverance itself feels like an emblem of lost methods to the modern eye. The film is just so damn unhurried, more interested in letting you get to know its characters and their different sensibilities before anything dramatic happens than cutting to the chase, more interested in showing you the tactile moments that goes into each sequence than zipping to the next one, and more interested in letting a moral choice or vicious consequence linger than wrap it up neatly and move on.

It is, in a word, slow. That’s not a criticism. In a film about how real life naturalism is being slowly but surely worn away, the filmmaking approach of deliverance embodies that same commitment to naturalism in its story and sensibility. There’s stylized elements, but more often than not, director John Boorman goes for an approach where the viewer is just along for the ride with these four city mice trying to hack it far and away in the forests of the deep south, with all the roaring rapids but also slack tides that come with.

That buttresses the premise of the film, which sees four friends from the city embark on a canoeing trip in a much more rural area before the local river is dammed and the area is flooded. While some in the group are more resourceful than others, few of them take the natural scenes and pitfalls they’re encountering very seriously, and not so shockingly, each of them, in one way or another, ends up paying a price for that.

That seems to be the other major theme of Deliverance -- the notion of a certain hubris of men (and, it should be noted, that this is an almost exclusively dude-centric film), who are so far removed from the wildland struggles of their ancestors but write them off and approach those challenges as toothless adventure. The main characters of the film (save for Lewis, the most adept of them) write off the people who live in this area as pliable bumpkins and take themselves to be masters of all they survey, notions they’re quickly disabused of.

The film explores the idea that there is not just a natural majesty to this place, one that the implements of modern life will soon be tampering with and trampling over, but that it is in some ways a bastion of the life and death choices, the need for survival and the difficulties that brings, that modern man is insulated from. And when our would-be heroes, who are salesmen and insurance agents and other folks who idealize or infantilize that sense of the wild and the history of humanity in places like these, are thrust into them, they’re forced to rediscover those long dormant parts of themselves and their world. Some rise to the challenge of that rude awakening better than others, but it takes, at a minimum, a psychological toll on each.

There’s a man vs. nature vibe to that, the way in which these mainly naive boys are thrust into an environment they believe to have tamed only to face threats they underestimated or wrote off. But there’s also a hint of Lord of the Flies in there, the notion that when returned to a state of nature, the harshness and brutality of man returns, in a way that can’t be shaken off when you leave it behind.

What’s so striking about Deliverance though is how it dramatizes those ideas. For one thing, it sells the viewer on the peacefulness and splendor of this place with the visuals and cinematography alone. Long before the plot kicks into gear, Boorman and his cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond bask in the natural beauty of the riverbound Georgia wilderness. Whether it’s bathing their stars in natural light, allowing the resplendent greenery to creep into every frame, or contrasting the rushing waters with the glowing palette of the evening sky, the pair repeatedly deliver on the bucolic beauty of their setting, to the point that it could just as easily function as a travel ad before, you know, the horrors begin.

(As an aside, it's not shocking to learn that Zsigmond was also the cinematographer for The Deer Hunter, which trafficks in versions of the same themes, and shares the same motif of weapons trained on deer as symbols of man’s connection to his elemental past.)

It’s also a film that bounces between complete cacophony and almost eerie quiet, between moments of great incident and excitement and terror, and slower but still meaningful stretches where the work, the in-betweens of those grand highs, is done. The dialogue of the film is naturalistic, with the four main characters ribbing each other and talking over one another and evincing the sense of four genuine acquaintances shooting the breeze in the midst of this little excursion.

But that banter is often punctuated by a startling calm, when even these chatterboxes, so poised to wax rhapsodic about the folly of the industrial man or just give one another the business, seem a bit awed and eventually cowed by their surroundings.

The film has any number of harrowing sequence, from a now iconic encounter with some abusive locals, to challenges that make them paranoid and forced to fight for their survival, to situations that call on them to walk that line between life and death that they are normally at such a distance from. But it also takes the time to show extended sequences of them digging in the dirt, climbing a cliffside, or breathing in the woodland air, with little to no dialogue or any sound at all beyond the regular noises of the outdoors. The edits are judicious, with each scene given time to stretch and unfold gradually, capturing a naturalism in the tack of the film to match the naturalism it wants to examine.

The film only truly falters once it leaves the woods, becoming a half-baked crime drama that, admittedly, goes the admirable work of exploring the psychological toll the main story of the film took on its central characters, forcing them to weigh the price of their actions and not so subtly telling them not to go where they don’t belong. But it feels out of step with the rest of the film, which as a whole is more interesting when it’s trying to be slice of life (albeit a very heightened version of it) than when it’s trying to be plotty.
But then Deliverance finds its center in the famed “Dueling Banjos” tune that serves as introduction, score, and musical metonym for the film. The interplay of the twang of the local’s banjo with the lyrical strum of the interloper’s guitar represents the mix of these city mice in their not-so industrialized surroundings, as gorgeous as it is foreboding, and the way that our heroes become as lost in those woods as Drew does in that melody.

Deliverance vindicates the sense of the unknowable, untamable part of nature, one that those who think themselves masters of this world may still find themselves humbled by. It is both admiring of, but also fearful of, what lies within those rustic confines and the old ways contained within them. But the film itself is also a time capsule of those same sort of old ways in film, of the slow and quiet and even meditative, more inclined to force the viewer to confront and live with the events in depicts than to shoot them from one to the other.

While that tack becomes tiresome when Deliverance emerges from the forest, until then, it is a film puts its characters, and the audience, in the middle of this unknowable and yet atavistically familiar place, and refuses to pull them out or look away until the full impact and realization of what lies there is fully and forcefully felt.