Boorman's Beauty

JAMES DICKEYS DELIVERANCE more a curiosity than a novel has been turned into one of the purest action films ever made and one of the most effective. Not unexpectedly the film's success can be credited largely to the efforts of producer director John Boorman.

True Dickey did according to the credits wwite the screenplay; he was even present on location throughout filming and is featured in the bit role of a hick Georgia sheriff; he plays it well. But the differences between book and novel are too essential to have come from mere revision. The prodding of an intelligence far-removed from Dickey's experience must have triggered the transformation.

Dickey is lucky that Boorman was the triggerman. Though he does not yet have the kind of reputation that immediately arouses expectations, the British-born filmmaker has shown a willingness to take on hackneyed material and push its freshest-elements to their most complex conclusions throughout his unheralded career. From Having a Wild Weekend to Point Blank to Hell in the Pacific to Leo the Last he has made poignant romance from rock group fantasy, existential comedy gangster shoot-em-up, psychological examination from World War II melodrama, revolutionary parable from absurdist fantasy. His record is not consistently successful. But each of his films is interesting, and Deliverance is his most accomplished film yet.

James Dickey wrote his book from the viewpoint of Ed Gentry, a middleaged commercial artist cognizant of his own limitations, living a comfortable life in suburbia with a wife and some but occasionally moved to greater passion than the bounds of his society normally permit His friend Lewis Medlock, is a wealthy landlord (by inheritance and physical-conditioning freak who compensates for the colorlessness of his contemporary existence by making frequent sojourns into nature. Gentry sometimes accompanies him. And the plot of Deliverance centers on one such trip.

With two other friends--Drew Ballinger, a bottling company president who represents everything good about suburban life (a moral and compassionate individualism), and Bobby Trippe, a salesman, who does just about the opposite--Medlock and Gentry take on their state's largest, toughest river in canoes. The Cahulawassee is about to be dammed up, made into Lake Cabula for the economic sake of marinas and retirement homes. Medlock wants to move as one with this unbridled piece of nature before its force is shattered.

GENTRY PARTICIPATES ENTHUSTASTICALLY, but fears Medlock's animal instincts: Lewis likes situations which demand primal confrontations between man and nature and man and his fellow, which pose mere survival as the only goal, and demand the urgent extension of all human powers save moral sense. And as murder adds to murder and natural injuries multiply, as Bobby is buggered and Drew drowned. Ed's fears are justified.

At journey's end, however. Dickey's narrator feels enriched by the experience. (And, even if Ed has had to subscribe out of necessity to Lewis's eithics on the trip's last legs, such a complete change is amazing.) He has taken on risks at a brute level which he hasn't dared in his work and home. The image of the river, we are told, becomes a core to his actual rootlessness, and is echoed in new collages which Ed attempts at his office and a new acceptance of his family. Even Medlock, never before so close to death, becomes something better than he was --"a human being." Betting on his own morality seems to have drawn the spirit out of him and made it more compassionate.

In short: Pretty trite stuff, with some good descriptive writing.

The movie becomes all description.

Boorman concentrates on the hard-core how rather than the obvious why. The reasons for men's actions in such extreme predicaments are clear, and do not need some sort of metaphysical explanation. The few lines remaining which echo Dickey's cock-eyed pantheism are mouthed by a character, the film's Lewis, who's close to caricature anyway. (All the book's characters are generalized in the film, and we don't know the last name of any or their occupations.) The difference between Boorman and Dickey is best summed up by the director's depiction of a moral argument which in the book is crucial.

After Lewis kills one of the pair of hillbillies who have sexually assaulted Bobby and are about to do the same to Ed. Drew contends that the body should be brought to the nearest sheriff, and that Lewis should plead his homicide justified. Lewis says that the situation won't permit its he would be tried by a jury of mountain people who would probably be the dead man's relatives lewis obtains group agreement (Ed is the deciding vote). In the book, the narrative progression is so lumps and Dickey's themes so muddled, that the some assumes importance not as another descending step into a home grown heart of darkness, but a thematic base for the reader to latch onto. When Drew later inexplicably keels over and out of his canoe, and drowns in a horrendous fall down a gorge's waterfall, we feel some innate moral order is rescuing this saint from this world and leaving the rest, bruised targets for the other stalking hillbilly, to their further sins.

IN THE FILM Drew is a nice but naive man who can't back it in the wilderness. The river adventures are so harrowingly detailed that we accept the necessity for survival ethics unquestionably doesn't attain a supernatural aura of self sufficiency and Bob's upset is offset by quiet strength (in the book he is an unmitigated bore). These two seam for the peace of their homes they hit land. And the only time we glimpse Lewis outside of his natural element is as he recuperates in a hospital bed.

The action is the point of the film. Even the most human moment the purely aesthetic understanding reached between Drew and a malformed hillbilly boy by playing a wild duet between guitar and banjo pulls its meaning out of moving fingers, Drew's smiles and grimaces and the boy's seeming impassivity the growing comprehension of the onlookers faces. And when we start to go downriver. Boorman's eye guiding Vilmos Szigmond's camera picks up the release of a smooth-skimming canoe when it catches the current, the disruptive churn of a sudden patch of rapids, the collected stillness of a stoned in pond.

By a fluke. I attended the first screening of Boorman's previous film open to anyone outside of MGM brass. Boorman was there. A young, very intelligent and open man, he confessed what he felt were his own limits, saying that he'd blown apart some of his films in desperate attempts transcend story, his hope was to find a situation which could be developed in cinematic terms as cleanly as possible, with little expository verbiage and much complexity of image. At least in technique. Deliverance is the film he's been working towards. You can take any one of his frames alone and see dynamic elements of the seene it comes from. Boorman doesn't use any tracks zooms springly, and rarely even moves his come a except to glide with a moving target. The editing is precise, and in the action scenes remarkably expressive of the feeling of the circumstances. These scenes have been timed to a human heart, not a metronome.

Still, Deliverance would not have worked as the Stepped-down film which Boorman fashioned were it not for the performance of Jon Voight as Ed. is the film's rock of common sense: his reactions give the film a base on which its audience can stand. Voight's eyes and stance manage to express naivite, moral and physical shock, the hard intent of a man who must reach a pinpointed goal, and the penance of a killer reawakened to humanity. Without him, the swagger of an uncontrolled Burt Reynolds as the uncontrollable Lewis, and the inordinate weakness in Ronny Cox's Drew, might have scuttled the production as well as its canoes.