In the Flesh: Deliverance (Patreon)

“This is all gonna be a lake, hundreds and hundreds of feet deep. You ever look at a lake and think about the things buried under it? That’s about as buried as anything can get.” There is a dark, sweat-soaked tension to Burt Reynolds’ line reading here, a sense that in the heat haze and shadow of the forest at the river’s edge reality has been suspended. The ghost of the flood to come hangs over the battered, dripping men assembled there around a rapist’s corpse, a tidal wave frozen in time as it crests above the dappled shade. In a few days’ time this river won’t exist. This grave. These men. It’s the same attitude with which the four friends put in far back upriver, from their snide dismissal of the hillbillies they hire to drive their cars to the town at the end of their canoe route to their tough guy chest-thumping about nature, the system, and survival outside of civilization. The river isn’t real to them. Their voyage isn’t real. The people in the hills are bumbling inbred stereotypes, not human beings like the four travelers.

And then, infamously, reality flexes like a great constrictor and crushes that arrogant remove without apparent effort. The locals take the dehumanization leveled against them and return it tenfold, a hunter feminizing and then sodomizing the plump Robert (Ned Beatty) while exhorting him to “squeal like a pig.” Survivalist Lewis’s (Reynolds) vengeance is short-lived, and no sooner have the four escaped then the river confirms his earlier statement that there’s no beating the water, smashing their canoes to kindling and breaking Lewis’s femur on the rocks. The weight of their shared crime presses the men flat against the weathered face of the gorge in which they find themselves trapped, bottled up by the threat of a hillbilly armed and stalking them from the clifftops above. Again and again we circle the question of who is animal and who is human. Earlier, we watch as Ed (Jon Voight) loses his nerve with a deer in his sights. When he finds the hillbilly, his tremors calm at the last moment.

Boorman shoots the voyage with a ready, fluid ease belying its extreme physical demands. His shadows are deep and liquid, his greens overwhelming, his focus alternatingly distant and serene and harrowingly intimate. In particular he captures partial reflections in the river’s surface with disarming subtlety, doubling and smearing images by using the water as a mirror, a kind of second lens through which we can perceive the smallness and fragility of the film’s characters. His shots of the fictional Georgia town of Aintry are hauntingly desolate, Roman ruins in the key of a factory town soon to be swamped and hidden forever by the coming reservoir. The men who come out of the river are changed forever, Lewis broken in spirit and perhaps in body, Robert shamed, Ed driven to paranoid rage. The river may be doomed, but it won’t be beaten. It can’t be beaten. It will still be running down there in the dark, unseen and untouchable, over the bones of the dead.