Here's the plot: The movie begins with the four men heading into the Georgia backwoods to take a canoe trip down this river before it is dammed by the power company (double meaning intended). One of the 4, Lewis, (Burt Reynolds) is a daredevil risktaker, the other three are family men seeking a little adventure. Before they reach the river, they stop for gas, where the most compassionate of the 4, Drew, plays the famous banjo/guitar duet with a homely mountain boy. They connect briefly through music, but the boy refuses to shake hands with Drew -- because his friends are condescending, because Drew says G**D*** or simply because he fears the men? The rift between the city men and the country folk leads to suspicion on both sides, but Lewis and the others trust their trucks to some men to deliver down river.
The first day of their trip is exhausting but invigorating. The four men irritate each other, and seem more focused on getting to their stopping point than on enjoying the journey, like most of us. The second day is when they meet with trouble. The two least prepared men are trapped by a couple mountain men who sexually assualt the softest of the two, Bobby. When they turn to assault Ed, Lewis shows up and shoots with an arrow the stronger of the two, and the other runs off. Then the psychological struggle heats up: Drew wants to report the crime, the rest vote to bury the body and cover up the deed. After the burial, Drew jumps/falls overboard in some rapids, Lewis breaks his leg and convinces Bobby and Ed that Drew was shot. Under the delusion that they are being pursued, Ed ends up shooting an uninvolved hunter, so they cover up another death by sinking the body. When they finally reach their destination, they barely escape being caught in their lies by the small town sheriff. He seems willing to look the other way because the town is soon to be drowned by the dammed river. As Ed leaves town, he watches a group of men exhuming graves to move the bodies of the dead. The final scene is Ed waking from a nightmare of a hand drifting up from the river, the implication perhaps being that he will be haunted by disrespecting the bodies left in the river.
When we first finished the movie, I was angry at myself for watching it: Now I'll have nightmares about toothless men in coveralls hiding out behind the campsite waiting for fresh meat - my plump children. But I keep puzzling over the title of the movie. Deliverance from what? From the river? From the people whose humanity has been disrespected by the city slickers? I thought it was to be a man vs. nature film, but really it's man vs. himself, and there is no deliverance from the punishment of guilt, except by accepting forgiveness.
I turned off the movie gripped with fear of strangers in the woods, but I also was gnawed on by a sense of loss: there aren't many wild places left where you can hide a dead body. Our experience of Tallulah Gorge will be tempered by the boundaries of the campground. Our friends will have a trailer with a flush toilet and a shower in the campsite next to ours. I'm sure we'll hear other campers' rock music, as we have on other camping trips. DishTV can reach even some of the most remote mountain dwellers. But we still keep trying to get away from the city, back to nature, to places that aren't as crowded and polluted by noise, seeking an authentic encounter with God's creation, unmediated by man's interference. We'll be treated to an aesthetic release of water from the dam, since it's a holiday weekend, so we'll get an idea of what those rapids used to be like (even if we won't be riding them). But it's unlikely we'll meet any locals, any of the people that lost their homes when the power company took over. Lewis would probably taunt us for thinking this is a trip to the wilds.
