USA comedy
1970
color 98 min.
Director: Bob Rafelson
CLV: $49.95 - available
           1 disc, catalog # CC1196L
By
1970, the '60s may have been over, but the youth of America was still riding the
crest of the Woodstock Festival into the new decade. 1969 gave us Neil Armstrong
walking on the moon, Charles Manson directing his followers to commit the
Tate-LaBianca murders, Senator Edward Kennedy driving his car off a bridge,
disclosure of the My Lei massacre, American troops bombing Cambodia, and American
cinema celebrating the life of the hippie with Easy Rider. 1970 seemed an
extension of the same year as the Chicago Seven were convicted of conspiracy to
riot, National Guardsmen shot and killed four students at Kent State University,
and American cinema celebrated the restlessness of the new middle class in
Five Easy Pieces. Five Easy Pieces is the ultimate road movie, a
relaxed masterpiece, a film of laid-back innovation that hasn't aged one iota
since its original release. There's no particular dramatic impetus in Five
Easy Pieces, just a journey from nowhere to nowhere, featuring a new actor
who grabbed the attention of the film-going public and who hasn't let go yet.
Before Jack Nicholson turned into Mr. Over-the-Top, he was an actor of supreme
subtlety and nuance. After several unremarkable appearances in Roger Corman films
and a couple of existential westerns, Nicholson finally demanded some attention
through a small role in Easy Rider, a part he got only after Rip Torn
dropped out of the film. He played a straight-laced lawyer who gets turned on by
two biker drug dealers played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. It earned him an
Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in 1969, which turned into a
nomination for Best Actor the next year for Five Easy Pieces.
In Five
Easy Pieces, Nicholson plays Bobby Dupea, an oil rig worker in Los Angeles
whose life is going nowhere. He lives in a world of lower-class people, day
laborers, waitresses, bowlers, poker players, etc. There's nothing extraordinary
about these individuals; in fact they're so damned commonplace that it's
extraordinary that anyone decided to make a movie about them. But somehow we're
attracted to Dupea, which is no easy feat considering the way he treats people,
especially his girlfriend, played by Karen Black with her patented form of
vacuousness.
She'll do anything he tells her to do as long as he tells her that
he loves her, which we know he will never do. But she still does whatever he
tells her to do, which frustrates him even more. When she flat out asks him if he
loves her, he says, "What do you think?" Bobby is a very good liar.
After his
best friend is surprisingly taken away by the FBI, Bobby decides to drive to
Seattle to visit his sick father. Not that he particularly cares; it's just
something to do. Dupea isn't running from anything or to anything; he's just
running, and taking advantage of every situation he possibly can. Obviously he
will never be satisfied. He's burdened with the overriding belief that there's
got to be something better than this, and he confuses a quest for freedom with an
inability to commit. "My character in Five Easy Pieces was written by a
woman (Adrien Joyce) who knew me very well," Nicholson said years later. "I was
playing it as an allegory of my own career."
In this film, Nicholson plays out
one of the all-time classic scenes in American cinema. Dupea finds himself
beating his head up against the establishment, personified by a waitress who is
just doing her job. It's impossible to imagine anyone not identifying with this
ridiculously funny attempt to simply get some toast. Who hasn't been stymied by a
bureaucrat? Who hasn't wanted to knock over all the dishes on the table? With
that one sweep of his arm, Nicholson becomes everyone's favorite iconoclast.
Considering the background of the filmmakers, Five Easy Pieces displays a
surprisingly sophisticated view of simple country western mentality. Bob Rafelson
was born in New York City, and he spent his teens doing an odd variety of jobs,
from rodeo worker to playing drums and bass for a jazz combo. He eventually
became a TV writer, adapting stage productions for The Play of the Week,
which led to his creating The Monkees TV show along with Paul Mazursky.
Though the show was denounced by critics as a piece of calculated nonsense,
Rafelson redeemed himself after the show was off the air by sending up the
Monkees in a brilliantly satirical and anarchistic film called Head
(1968), which he directed, co-wrote, and co-produced with Jack Nicholson.
Who
would have guessed that two years later, this creative team would have conceived
such a thoroughly adult and refined film as Five Easy Pieces. Both critics
and audiences agreed that the film was something special. As usual, Pauline Kael
put it best, and longest. "It's a striking movie," she said, "eloquent,
important, written and improvised in a clear-hearted American idiom that derives
from no other civilization, and describing as if for the first time the nature of
the familiar American man who feels he has to keep running because the only good
is momentum."
In the end, Dupea is still on a journey, an oil rig worker on his
way to Alaska for no reason at all. It's an easy way out, and it seems the
perfect vague ending, but hindsight gives the scene a strange psychic twist. How
could he, how could anyone have known, that the U.S. was about to embark on one
of the largest oil construction projects ever attempted, the Trans-Alaskan
Project, completed in 1977? Bobby actually made the perfect move. He's on his way
to a gold mine.
-- MICHAEL DARE
Credits
Director: Bob Rafelson
Produced by: Bob Rafelson, Richard Wechsler
Executive Producer: Bert
Schneider
Screenplay by: Adrien Joyce
Story by: Bob Rafelson, Adrien
Joyce
Director of Photography: Laszlo Kovacs
Association Producer: Harold
Schneider
Interior Designer: Toby Rafelson
Film Editors: Christopher
Holmes, Gerald Shepard
Songs performed by: Tammy
Wynette
Transfer
This edition of Five Easy Pieces was
transferred from a 35mm interpositive in its correct aspect ratio. The soundtrack
was mastered from a 35mm magnetic track.