"Sometimes you have to lose yourself before you can find anything."
John Boorman specialized in art-inflected explorations of masculinity. Deliverance (1972) is more accessible than Point Blank but even more unnerving, writing instinctive male fears against a primal landscape.A quartet of Atlanta businessmen make a canoeing trip into rural Georgia. Things go awry when Bobby Trippe (Ned Beatty) and Ed Gentry (Jon Voight) run afoul of two rapacious rednecks (Bill McKinney and Herbert Coward), forcing Lewis Medlock (Burt Reynolds) to kill one of them. The men battle nature and wrestle with their consciences while traveling back to town, their adventure becoming a fight for survival.
Based on James Dickey's novel, Deliverance fits alongside Wake In Fright and Straw Dogs, showing city folk defiled by rural society. Lewis and friends bemoan the despoilment of nature (aired over a pretentious montage), but treat locals as inbred hicks. Their only connection comes when Drew (Ronny Cox) plays banjo with a boy who spurns deeper contact. Bobby's rape is both a personal humiliation and show of rural America getting revenge on a condescending modern world.
Boorman defines his heroes in ways more subtle than sodomy. Lewis starts out as a tough, bow-slinging swaggerer declaiming sermons on society's decline; upon breaking his leg he becomes nearly useless. Ed overcomes his skittishness, driven to violence and becoming a real survivor. Bobby's useless in the woods but proves useful when suspicious lawmen interrogate the group. Each hero takes measure of their manliness, instinct and personality separating heroes from poseurs.
Symbolism aside, Boorman mostly dials down his florid style. He and Vilmos Sigmond make striking use of Georgia locations, both beautiful and forbidding. Boorman opts for unadorned direction, allowing nature sounds to compensate for a near-lack of music. Scenes of the gang fighting rapids or Ed repelling down a mountainside play in unspoiled long shots, absorbing audiences along with the characters.
Burt Reynolds provides a conflicted character who loses his external swagger for cringing impotence. Jon Voight gets the bigger character arc, slowly finding his way in an impossible situation. Ned Beatty scores by keeping Bobby's dignity intact through his inhuman treatment. Ronny Cox is the most likeable despite his less-prominent role. Bill McKinney (a frequent Clint Eastwood villain) and Herbert Coward make the two scurviest rednecks in cinema history.
Deliverance isn't as bleak as Straw Dogs, despite its similar set-up and graphic violence. Having faced their limits, Ed, Lewis and Bobby can return to city life with their manhood confirmed. Their self-actualization nearly makes up for rape, mutilation and a lifetime's worth of trauma.