Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Directed by: Bob
Rafelson.
Written by: Carole
Eastman (as Adrien Joyce) and Bob Rafelson.
Starring: Jack Nicholson (Robert
Eroica Dupea), Karen Black (Rayette Dipesto), Lois Smith (Partita Dupea), Susan
Anspach (Catherine Van Oost), Ralph Waite (Carl Fidelio Dupea), Billy Green
Bush (Elton), Fannie Flagg (Stoney), Sally Struthers (Betty), Marlena MacGuire (Twinky),
William Challee (Nicholas Dupea), Helena Kallianiotes (Palm Apodaca), Toni
Basil (Terry Grouse), Lorna Thayer (Waitress), John P. Ryan (Spicer), Irene
Dailey (Samia Glavia).
Bobby
Dupea spends the entirety of Five Easy Pieces in various stages of discomfort.
When we meet him, he is working the oil fields in California – but he doesn’t
quite seem to fit in there, although he is trying very hard to act like his
friend Elton (Billy Green Bush) – including the type of woman he is dating –
Rayette (Karen Black), a waitress who talks a lot and loves Tammy Wynette, and
loves Bobby even though he is mostly terrible to her. But Bobby is prone to
outbursts – he tries to keep things under control, but he’s not quite able to
do so, and his contempt for those around him comes out around the edges – until
one time he just comes right out and calls Elton a hick, and finds it ridiculous
that he would compare his life to Bobby’s.
Bobby is
played by Jack Nicholson in one of his great early performances. Nicholson had
been around for years, working low-budget Roger Corman movies, and some of
those early films he’s quite good in (the pair of Monte Hellman Westerns The
Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, both 1966 for example) – but he didn’t
really become known until Easy Rider in 1969 – which garnered him his first
Oscar nomination. Five Easy Pieces was his first starring role coming off Easy
Rider – and got him his second Oscar nomination (first in the lead category)
and it remains one of Nicholson’s defining performances. There are moments when
“Jack” comes out in Five Easy Pieces of course – the film’s best known moment
is his speech to a waitress about his breakfast which ends with the classic
line “I want you to hold it between your knees” – but much of what makes this
performance so good is in between those “Jack” moments – and the subtlety with
which he plays them.
We find out
of course that Bobby isn’t a regular oil rig worker – he comes from an upper
crust family of classically trained musicians in Washington state that he
walked out a few years earlier because he wasn’t any more comfortable there
then he it turned out he is with the oil field workers. He finds out his
demanding father has suffered a stroke when he sees his sister, Partita (Lois
Smith), who like Rayette, loves Bobby unconditionally, when really she probably
shouldn’t. So he decides to head back to the hold house and see the old man –
and against his better judgment, is convinced to bring Rayette, who is now
pregnant, along with him.
The two
halves of the film – separated by the long, often comedic car ride to get
there, where they pick up a pair of hitchhikers, one of whom says “I don’t even
want to talk about it” repeatedly, and then, of course, proceeding to talk
about it, have very different looks and feels to them. Director Bob Rafelson
and cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs do this deliberately of course – contrasting
the dusty, sweaty, sunburnt world of the oil fields with the greener, chillier
world of Washington state – even taking a little detour through the streets
with Bobby, the type of which his upper crust family would never walk down.
Bobby
isn’t any more comfortable at home then he was in California. His family is
mostly welcoming – his father who has had a few strokes, glowers at him, but
doesn’t say away. Of course Partita is welcoming and accommodating. His
brother, Carl (Ralph Waite) couldn’t possibly be politer to Bobby – of course
in that sort of passive-aggressive way. Bobby, who has left Rayette behind at a
motel, sets his sights of Carl’s young protégé/girlfriend, Catherine (Susan
Anspach) – although I’m not even sure he could explain why. But Catherine has
his number from the get-go – she may sleep with him, but she knows damn well
which brother is the safer bet.
Five Easy
Pieces is one of the key films of what was then a new movement – a turning away
from the big and bloated Hollywood films, into something more personal,
something that spoke to younger filmgoers. In his great movie essay, Roger
Ebert called it the first “Sundance” film – and sure enough, in broad outlines,
it certainly does sound like many a Sundance film about going home. A Sundance
film though would be full of quirky characters, which other than Partita, this
doesn’t really have (and she’s quirky in such a fascinating way, I wish there
were a movie just about her), and would end on a happier note, after much soul
baring conversations were had. Five Easy Pieces really only has one of those –
late in the film when Bobby speaks one-on-one with his father, and says the
types of things he could never say to him if his father could speak back. It
may be the one time in the film when Bobby lets his guard down completely.
The rest
of the movie Bobby is bundle of pent up anger, that he sometimes let out. It’s
a youthful, immature anger – he wants to reject his family, but doesn’t really
know what to do after that. Certainly, there has to be something between the
pretentious family he came from, and oil fields full of hicks as he describes
them he escaped to. He doesn’t fit in either place, because of course he
doesn’t – he only fled to one because he couldn’t stand the other. Bobby is an
asshole – an off-putting one for much of the film, and Nicholson doesn’t do
anything to soften it, except to make him capable of being funny and charming
when he wants to be. It’s how he sleeps with multiple women during the course
of the movie. She’s also smart and well-spoken – capable of belittling that
waitress, in a way that impresses that hitchhiker, but that Bobby knows is just
petty, impotent protest. He doesn’t accomplish anything.
Karen
Black also deserves credit for her great performances as Rayette. She is a
character who is more than a little pathetic for who she clings to Bobby, how
she keeps asking if he loves her when she knows he’ll never say it, and how she
keeps hanging around no matter what he does. She can also be annoying in a way
that makes you understand just why Bobby may be trying to get away from her.
And yet, she’s not stupid. In many ways, Rayette is the smartest character in
the movie – look how right up until the last scene in the film, she gets what
she wants, one way or another. How she manipulates Bobby into taking her along,
how when faced with a room full of stuffy intellectuals, she is able to feign
innocence, and bait one of them into taking a shot at her – so that Bobby will
explode and come to her defense.
The final
scene in the film is justly famous. It cements Bobby as an asshole to be sure –
a man who is running away once again, although you can argue just what he’s
doing – just trying to get away from Rayette, or in my opinion the more likely
scenario, running off to start again somewhere, anonymously. It’s a downer of
an ending to be sure – but an honest one for Bobby.
Watching
the film now, 50 years later, is an odd experience. It’s impossible to see it
through the eyes of an audience back then - when Nicholson was a new, rising
star, the rest of the cast was mainly unknown, and Rafelson was also largely
unknown – but was a key figure in the time, even if his career didn’t quite
turn out the way you may have expected from this movie. The film certainly
tapped into the youthful rebellion of the time – but remarkably, it does so
with clearer eyes than say Easy Rider did. They may well have related to Bobby –
but he isn’t a hero, romantic or otherwise. He’s a self-pitying,
self-destructive asshole, who wants to reject everything he was taught, but has
no idea what to replace it with. You cannot help but wonder what he became
throughout the ‘70s – and beyond.
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