Adventures of a Suburban Boy (review)

Search for Grace

The landscape of the imagination is formed early; it grows out of the first childhood tensions and dreams. At least, this would seem to be the case with John Boorman, the British director of Point Blank, Deliverance and The Emerald Forest. Although his autobiography does everything that one would expect of a famous film director (it covers the youthful struggles, the on-set traumas and the encounters with famous people), it is, in essence, a more interior story about the search for a vision and about how human frailty and industrial contingency make this a life-long quest. Boorman has written a graceful, even poetic book, as good in its way as Michael Powell's two masterful autobiographies.

In fact, like Powell, David Lean and even Derek Jarman, Boorman is one of those English directors for whom films are a way of battling with, and escaping from, the social and emotional limitations of this overcrowded island. As his opening chapters point out, he was born in 1933 into a particular class trap, "a faceless, mindless London suburb amongst people who had lost their way in the world, who had forgotten who they were, and had fallen from grace". In his memory, the neat, semi-detached houses of Carshalton contained a deracinated lower middle class cut off from its natural instincts by industrialisation and the First World War; as in his beloved Arthurian legends, "the Grail was lost because men had sinned against nature".

For the young John, there were personal falls from grace, too; his mother was really in love with his father's best friend, and there was an unstated rivalry for her affection between the boy and the elder Boorman. Yet redemption was at hand in the surprising form of Adolf Hitler. With his father away at the war, John and his family fled the bombs by moving to his maternal grandfather's bungalow by the Thames at Shepperton. Here, the boy developed his lifelong love of water and the sense of spiritual wholeness that it offered: "We had left the landlocked and earthbound suburbs and embraced the flow of river life. Our lives were fluid." One summer's day, when he was a teenager, he took off in his canoe to Runnymede, and, in the water, experienced what he calls an "epiphany": "I knew myself to be in a state of grace...That experience, so profound, sent me on a quest for images, through cinema, to try to recapture what I knew that day."

Viewed in this light, much of Boorman's work is a search for grace and the Grail with men pitching themselves against the forces of nature (Deliverance (1972), The Emerald Forest (1985)), or, in Excalibur (1981), returning to the roots of the lost England, to the primordial battle between pagan and Christian. (Division haunts Boorman's world; although an Anglican, he went to a Roman Catholic school.) Yet he has been as fascinated by the modern trap as by its mythic and elemental shadows. As he notes himself, Point Blank (1967), his first Hollywood film, places Lee Marvin in the kind of emotional triangle that Boorman witnessed between his parents and his father's chum; his other film with Marvin, Hell in the Pacific (1968), has an American airman and a Japanese naval officer (Toshiro Mifune) stranded on a lonely Pacific island; it plays out the ironies of two enemies forced to rely on each other in a kind of Arthurian wasteland.

Moreover, the effort of getting these stories on film has been as dramatic as any of the conflicts that they contain. Apart from meddling executives (who are an occupational hazard), Boorman has had to contend with inhospitable locations, upturned canoes and near drowning, malevolent tropical diseases and highly unreliable examples of light aircraft. Like Sam Peckinpah, it seems, he needs a crisis in order...