MovieMartyr.com - Five Easy Pieces

I’d be tempted to call Five Easy Pieces, with its myriad scenes of familial reconciliation and wishy-washy male protagonist, a chick flick for guys, but there aren’t many chick flicks that are this carefully observed and finely tuned. Featuring a top-notch performance by Jack Nicholson, as Bobby, a man who can’t commit to much of anything out of fear of failure, the movie is subdued and intimate, even by ‘70s standards. As Five Easy Pieces begins, we find Bobby working as an oil rigger and living in a trailer park, but in his obvious dissatisfaction with the disappointments of his life, we start to imagine that there’s more than meets the eye to him. It’s no surprise then, when the frustrations of a traffic jam push him over the edge and set him on a personal odyssey that forces him to revisit his past and confront his demons.

It’s to Five Easy Pieces’ credit that it lets us see Bobby in the context that it does at the start of the movie before it begins to explain his behavior, and it’s probably an even bigger achievement that it doesn’t neatly wrap him up for our safe consumption by the end of the film. Bobby’s a drifter that occasionally settles down for a while, and he forces those that he meets to learn that in order to love him, they have to be willing to accept the fact that he might not always be there. He’s a coward underneath his brazen exterior, and it’s his desperate attempts to hide that from the outside world that that make him endearing. Karen Black’s performance as Ray, his girlfriend, is so affecting mostly because she’s not bright enough to see through this façade, and, as such, she can’t articulate her dissatisfaction with him. Initially, it might seem as if Nicholson is demonstrating only one emotion per scene, but by the picture’s end, it becomes apparent that there was always a dislocation of self underneath his grandstanding. His outbursts all hint at a deeper, very real, sense of alienated hurt.

The movie’s slightly grainy look captures the nostalgic feel of the film, and Rafelson’s direction is so unobtrusive that we barely notice his occasional tracking shots and arty compositions. There’s a stunning amount of humor and heartbreak contained in Five Easy Pieces, which often seems endless in the possibilities of its human observation. Helena Kallianiotes has an unforgettable comic turn as a filth-obsessed, lesbian, hippie hitchhiker. Susan Anspach and Lois Smith are nearly as good in roles that are much more serious. Since the movie refuses to choose sides between Bobby’s past and present, it becomes far more rewarding than it would have been if it found something to blame for him turning out the way he did. This is surprising, since all along the movie felt as if it were meandering toward a great, universal truth. At its end, though, Five Easy Pieces hasn’t given the audience many definitive answers, but in leaving things unanswered, it tells us more about Bobby, and ourselves, than anything definitive could.

* * * * Masterpiece

06-09-02

Jeremy Heilman