105. Cutter's Way [B-]
John Heard is fantastic in this film, and it makes me a little sad that he hasn't had a huge career in the decades since. Sure, he's been working, but playing the dad in a couple of
Home Alone movies hardly compares to his performance here. Heard's Alex Cutter is profane, prone to violence, paranoid, a constant drunk, and at times simply mad. Yet we sympathize with him, find him funny, and at times the character is brilliantly insightful (his "I'm hungry" speech is dead on).
The film is at it's best when the focus is on Cutter--I like Jeff Bridges, but his character of Richard Bone is the straight man here, and less interesting than the wild and unpredictable Cutter. The film treats Bridges as the protagonist, but it isn't nearly as interesting when his co-star is off-screen.
The plot, since I haven't mentioned it, is rather simple. On his way to meet his friend Cutter at the bar, Richard Bone sees a mysterious car in the distance and the silhouette of a man dumping something into a garbage can. It turns out a young girl was murdered, and when (only for an instant) Bone is convinced that man he sees in a parade might be the killer, Cutter grasps onto this mystery with uncontrollable obsession. Is the man Bone sees in the parade the killer? The film never answers that question--and it's the kind of ambiguity that will drive some viewers mad. But in the end, it doesn't really matter, at least not to this viewer. This is a film about Cutter's decent into madness and paranoia--whether he's correct or not seems incidental.
The very end, however, is somewhat unsettling. I'm not convinced that Bridges would buy into Cutter's conspiracy theory. Perhaps this is the point.
I'll deduct a grade due to the music score, which is intrusive and cheesy (what sounds like a saw being played with a bow overcomes the score at several points, and it is a serious distraction). But it's a solid film--one of the last hurrahs of New Hollywood, although the look of the 1980s permeates the proceedings (despite the film being made in the first year of that decade).
Too Much Fun said:
About "Deliverance", I really didn't understand the point of the rape. I was enjoying the movie until it happened (I was a little less ignorant this time...I knew something disturbing was going to happen), but when the movie ended, I couldn't really figure out what its purpose was besides to shock people with some gratuitous violence. I guess it's supposed to be making some kind of statement on 'Man vs. Nature', but that didn't seem natural to me. It's like they had a realistic, plausible story about men out in the wilderness and felt they had to punch it up with something grotesque.
I was really digging the character development and scenery at the beginning. Then we got this hideous, ugly scene, and the movie kind of went nowhere. I think I would have preferred to see where the movie went without it. As it stands, I see half of a good movie that blows it in the middle with a big wtf. Actually I like a lot of scenes after the rape too, but like I said, I would have preferred a different climax and to see where it would take the story.
Much like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974), it's a movie that I think has a good beginning and a good ending, but a disappointing middle, because the middle only tries to earn the movie a reputation based on 'freak show appeal'. And don't think I'm a prude about violence. I can enjoy excessive movie violence as much as the next guy, but in these cases it just struck me as stupid, irritating, and unnecessary.
I can't agree. Without the violence that permeates the film (a rape and three deaths) there is no film. The character arcs of all four leads would be nonexistent without the rape and the subsequent killing of the hillbilly perpetrator. Ed would never regain his masculinity, Lewis would never have the fraud of his machismo exposed, Bobby wouldn't be traumatized, and Drew would never be forced to abandon his view of morality and justice.
The violence isn't gratuitous if it's central to the story! Instead of being a movie about four "civilized" men facing destruction (both personal and moral) at the hands of "nature," it's a movie about a canoe trip where the characters learn nothing about themselves.
I had wondered how it garnered a Best Picture nomination.
One imagines it consolidated the "British" vote.
It helps that it was very well-reviewed, and that the field was expanded to ten films, as well.
), but for me overall it's like one of those movies with a stupid twist that ruins the whole story and squanders great potential shown early on.
