Failing to Deliver

...Here the glimmers on the river surface, the multiplicity of forest greens, the nocturnal climb up a steep rocky bank, the many tumultuous scenes of shooting the rapids are managed with a fine, unflashy fidelity...

...Dickey himself contributes a nice bit as the Sheriff, and various back-country types are good and creepy...

...Both myths derive from a state of existential immaturity, no less eternal or seductive for being immature...

...Alas, the film manages to shave away most of the meaning and implications that made the novel interesting...

...The novel is full of trouvailles like "I lay awake all night in brilliant sleep," or this almost too clever evocation of Drew's widowed wife: " 'All right,' she said from far off, from the future, from all the years coming up, and from the first night alone in bed...

...Ed has to take over as leader...

...A good example of this is Alain-Fournier's Le grand Meaulnes (The Wanderer...

...Ronny Cox plays Drew decently enough, within the limitations of the script's not showing his city life...

...Coming upon dangerous rapids, all four capsize and Drew dies, possibly gunned down by the surviving cracker...

...It was seriously discussible and discussed in the better journals and had a literate following...

...The other two are Drew, a decent, hard-working company man, whose conventional nature is mitigated only by his proficiency on the guitar...

...It is the way the mind operates in . . . extremis that tells more about what we are than anything else possibly could...

...even worse are a couple of plug-ugly mountain men who capture Ed and Bobby and sodomize the latter...

...The only raison d'etre for being middle-aged or old is the possession of an absolute mastery of something...

...and the ultimate besting of the apparent superman by the seemingly more ordinary but actually more complex fellow...

...And a scene like this conjugal buggery connects with the brutal sodomizing of Bobby, exemplifying the kind of near-parallel and disturbing echo on which the book thrives, and whose loss impoverishes the film...

...The style, however, is vastly different, often very close to that of Dickey's excellent poetry...

...finally, suspicious lawmen...

...While sodomizing his wife, Ed remembers the golden fleck he saw in a fashion model's iris, and muses "in the center of Martha's heaving and expertly working back, the gold eye shone, not with the practicality of sex, so necessary to its survival, but the promise of it that promised other things, another life, deliverance...

...at worst, the long second act of a three-act play...

...What we get is at best a triptych without the side panels...

...Of this, James Dickey's novel, Deliverance, is a prime specimen...

...The duality-as ancient and respectable as that of Greek drama -Is manifest in the divergence of style and content, a divergence more real than apparent...

...He triumphs over unclimbable cliffs, virtually untra-versable rapids, the murderous mountain man (whom he kills) and...

...The typical homme moyen sensuel, who is also the author's chief alter ego, goes on to perform tasks of almost superhuman strength, skill and intelligence...

...He is a successful yet restless advertising executive, whose life hovers at the junction of the bourgeois paterfamilias, the enthusiastic practitioner of archery, and the artistically tinged thinker and dreamer...

...Gone, too, is Ed's final, amoral victory: his ascent to true supermanhood for having been able to kill an inferior human being with impunity...

...from its imagery and interior monologues-even from some of its intense descriptions-levels of meaning recede bevond the ken of the blissful bestseller reader...

...Ned Beatty, as Bobby, is good, though he overemphasizes the character's comic side...

...He succeeds in doing all this expertly, but at a psychic price: Although the experience of the river will remain with him as a proud testimonial to his mastery, there will also be a lingering sense of guilt and anxiety...

...As Lewis, Burt Reynolds is handsome and aggressively virile, but conveys no ideological or mystical superiority, and is a very shallow actor...

...Simpler things yet are gone, including the sense of unity between man and animals and nature-the profound underside of surface hostilities...

...Beyond that, the novel Deliverance is concerned, more cryptically and perhaps even partly unconsciously, with the nature of sexual relations, real or implied, between men and women, men and men, and men and idealized figments of their imagination, such as a girl espied in a quasi-sexual situation who remains a tantalizing chimera...

...Jon Voight, a young actor who looks even younger than his age, is far too handsome and ex-istentially unthreatened for Ed Gentry...

...Suppose one rejects the first of these images as unfilmable, the second could be rendered by panning to the conjugal bed soon to be half unused-assuming, of course, that the entire scene were not cut from the film, as it was...

...the way men change under the destroying or annealing flame of danger, and how this connects with their previous and future existences...

...The three main subjects of the book, then, are the fear of stagnation and growing old that drives some men to seek unusual risks and challenges...

...Sam Peckinpah having been unavailable, John Boorman was a logical second choice for director of this film combining the brutality of Point Blank with the nastiness and isolation of Hell in the Pacific...

...His principal disciple and admirer-almost worshiper-Is Ed Gentry, the narrator...

...Missing even is that vital passage where the book's title word makes its only appearance...

...The violent sequences succeed well enough, as does even an occasional nonviolent one, such as the impromptu guitar and banjo duet and duel between Drew and a semicre-tinous mountain boy...

...What is perhaps most acutely missing from the film is Dickey's poetry...

...Without mastery, middle age is a joke and old age is hell itself...

...In the end, though, satisfaction prevails: We glimpse Ed in later life, clearly superior to the limping, chastened Lewis...

...The river proves a serious danger to life and limb...

...Deliverance, the novel, was a curious hybrid...

...and Bobby, a soft city slicker and a cynical "born salesman," who is at the lowest notch of Dickey's four-degree scale...

...The movie carefully avoids this ticklish central issue and substitutes a protagonist haunted by nightmares of retribution-the ultimate flattening compromise...

...The other, in a sense its opposite, is the very masculine myth of rites of passage, the ordeal of ritual by means of which we become real men rather than boys...

...The remaining three adventurers are beached-lewis incapacitated with a broken leg, and Bobby unnerved by the painful and humiliating assault...

...This dependable performer, moreover, gives one of his rare unconvincing performances, possibly because the truncated script does not offer him sufficient motivation and opportunity for emotional shading...

...The story is pure, violent adventure, almost completely devoid of "love interest," and all about a life-and-death struggle with hostile natural elements and fierce quasi-troglodytes, a struggle that tests and confirms one's manhood...

...The other escapes, intending to pick off the four canoers from the high banks of the river later on...

...In the wilderness, strange things befall these men...

...This usually centers on a test of severe physical, and sometimes also sexual, endurance that some pass while others fall by the wayside...

...but it also became a popular bestseller...

...One is the myth of lost childhood, of the personal, private Age of Gold that we once possessed and vainly try to recapture, returning to it only at the cost of losing our sanity or life itself...

...They are spurred on by Lewis, a passionate sportsman and adventurer, who rather yearns for an atomic holocaust to bring about the kind of world in which he would become a leader...

...That the film caters to him exclusively is surely not to be blamed on the script, by Dickey himself, but on the avatars it underwent in the hands of John Boorman, the director...

...By the mere fact of almost totally eliminating the prelude and postlude in the city (what little is left is more confusing than helpful), the deeper intentions were jettisoned...

...Dickey's book of diary jottings, Sorties, is full of these themes: "What is this fascination in me for attempting and spending a great deal of time on activities for which I have no natural ability...

...The cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond gets better, because less flamboyant, with his every new film...

...The dialogue, probably the weakest part of the book, has been sensibly trimmed...

...But a voiceover interior monologue would have been appropriate to convey a little of the work's true texture...

...Before they can do further harm, Lewis shoots one of them dead with an arrow...

...No less damaging than the cutting is the casting...

...The story concerns four middle-aged Atlanta businessmen who go on a weekend canoe trip down a faraway, little-explored and essentially unnavigable river...

...But the larger and subtler implications are beyond Boorman's competence...

...Clearly, then, the title has much deeper meanings than just escaping from the river wilderness, meanings that add up to a quixotic search for deliverance from our transience, our mortality...

...As a superman, he is more Nietzschean than Hitlerian, and he has genuine feeling for a wilderness soon to be dammed up into an artificial lake for the benefit of industry and tourism...

...he brings his friends and himself back to civilization and safety...

...Yet how easily the camera could have conveyed, for example, Dickey's recurrent image of the hillbilly hinterland with its maimed rustics as "the country of the nine-fingered people...