Five Easy Pieces
Bob Rafelson (1970)
Five Easy Pieces is widely regarded as a quintessentially late sixties-early seventies picture and I’ve always thought of it that way. (I first saw it when I was around seventeen, when I thought it was brilliant.) Forty years on from its original release, the film seems to have more in common than you’d therefore expect with rebel-without-a-cause movies of two decades earlier. If the film’s protagonist Bobby Dupea were asked ‘What are you rebelling against?’ he might well answer ‘What have you got?’ Bobby isn’t far off doing so when, late on in the picture, he says to his father: ‘I move around a lot, not because I’m looking for anything really, but ’cause I’m getting away from things that get bad if I stay’. Bob Rafelson, who’d become famous as one of the creators of the Monkees, had made just one cinema film (Head, which I don’t know) before this. He’s made only eight more features in the four decades since and has never come close to repeating the success of Five Easy Pieces. This could be taken as evidence of Hollywood’s inability to accommodate personal filmmakers like Rafelson (as Richard Combs strongly implied in his introduction to the BFI screening). If that is the explanation, it’s a great pity but I can’t feel, on the strength of the two other Rafelson pictures I’ve seen, that it’s an overpowering loss. Back in 1981 I walked out of his remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice. The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), his next film after Five Easy Pieces, is glum in a drab, congealed way. Five Easy Pieces is determinedly melancholy too but, in comparison with Marvin Gardens, its nihilism is often invigorating.
That certainly goes for its star anyway. In retrospect, the role of Robert Eroica Dupea is an unusual one for Jack Nicholson. Other than Reds, in which he played Eugene O’Neill, I can’t think of another film in which Nicholson has portrayed a decidedly cultured man. It’s certainly easier to call to mind pictures in which, as an introspective character, he has seemed uncomfortably constrained (The King of Marvin Gardens, The Passenger, Ironweed, About Schmidt). Nicholson reminds you in Five Easy Pieces that, at this point in his career, his character range looked to be excitingly larger than it seems now. His two sides as an actor – the show-off and the man in a brown study – have often been difficult for him to reconcile but they have a terrific friction here. As a result, Nicholson is extraordinarily good at animating the tensions in Bobby Dupea’s split personality. Raised and trained to be a classical musician, like his father and his siblings, Bobby, at the start of the film, is a blue-collar worker in the California oil fields, living with Rayette (Karen Black), a dumb-brunette waitress who wants to be a Country and Western singing star (and whom Bobby’s just got pregnant). In these early scenes, Nicholson uses his wall-eyed look very effectively, to suggest something hidden behind the beer-drinking, promiscuous working man (Bobby has also modified his accent to suit his present circumstances). In a way, Five Easy Pieces is constructed like a screen musical. Its obvious highlights are the equivalent of the song and dance numbers: when Bobby, in the middle of a traffic jam, gets out of his car and onto the back of a removal lorry carrying a piano, and starts playing it; or when he vents his anger at a waitress (Lorna Thayer) in a freeway diner (a justly famous sequence) or at an intellectual snob (Irene Dailey) at a gathering at the Dupeas’ family home in Washington. Nicholson is marvellous at these verbal assaults – he’s electrifying but he’s also in character.
Bobby looks to be in his thirties, has never had the professional career envisaged for him and we learn that it’s two or three years since he last had a spell at home in Washington, to where he returns when he learns his father is seriously ill. We assume his adult life has gone round in circles: disappearing somewhere to start a new life, returning home, going off again to start a different life. His family lives in a big, largely empty house. There’s a nearly continuous sound of mournful piano music emanating from somewhere in it. There are framed photographs on the walls, all suggesting people – of different generations – whose best years are behind them. The paterfamilias Nicholas (William Challee) is wheelchair-bound and can’t speak. Bobby’s elder brother (Ralph Waite) and sister (Lois Smith) are both unmarried. The brother is stuck in a neck brace for good measure. This obvious representation of a culturally rarefied, passionless existence is contrasted with the musical and sexual vitality of Rayette’s C&W world. There is emotional substance in Tammi Wynette’s singing of ‘Stand By Your Man’ and the other songs on the soundtrack, and a warmth and plaintiveness in Karen Black’s voice too. Yet Bob Rafelson and the screenwriter Carole Eastman (writing as Adrien Joyce) tend to treat the working-class culture condescendingly. Rayette is often used – like the two women (Marlena MacGuire and Sally Struthers) whom Bobby meets in a bowling alley, and with whom he and Elton (Billy Green Bush), his workmate at the oil rig, subsequently have a sex foursome – to exasperate Bobby and to give Nicholson the opportunity to make hay with his character’s exasperation. (Nicholson is nonetheless very strong at the end of the bowling alley conversation, when the two women go, and he sits thinking about how heartlessly he’s treated them and, a few minutes earlier, Rayette.)
Five Easy Pieces is crude, even if sometimes enjoyably so, in setting up conflicts between caricatures – as in the scene when Rayette joins the Dupea family and is cluelessly sociable at their dinner table. (‘You got a beautiful head of hair’, she compliments Catherine (Susan Anspach), a musician staying at the family home. ‘Is it natural?’) One thing that’s striking about the film, though, is the lack of distance between its targets’ and its own opinions. The most obvious example is provided by the two girls to whom Bobby and Rayette give a lift on the road to Washington (the girls’ car has broken down). The talkative one of the pair (Helena Kallianiotes) sits in the back inveighing against everything under the sun as ‘crap’: the invective is ridiculous and makes you laugh – as does the character’s name, Palm Apodaca. Yet Rafelson and Eastman never come up with, or seem to want to come up with, anything to suggest that the world isn’t ubiquitously crap. On the one occasion that Palm has something positive to say about another human being, when she praises Bobby’s excoriation of the hidebound waitress in the diner, he reminds her that ‘I still didn’t get my toast’.
Bobby isn’t rebelling against tyrannies with anything better in mind but when Catherine, with whom he briefly has an affair, argues against his negativity, she gets nowhere – and we, as well as she, are made to feel his pessimism is unanswerably right. The film-makers are furiously dismissive of the ridiculous, hectoring loudmouth at the drinks party; Bobby turns on her when she starts referring to Rayette as if she were an anthropological curiosity, even though Carole Eastman doesn’t seem to view her very differently. This convergence between the points of view of the figures of fun in the story, of its recalcitrant protagonist and of the writer and director seems to be virtually acknowledged at the very end. Palm and her companion (Toni Basil) – who’s called Terry Grouse, although she’s the uncomplaining member of the partnership – are headed for Alaska, because, Palm says, ‘I’ve heard it’s very clean’. In the final scene of Five Easy Pieces, when Bobby climbs into the passenger seat of a timber lorry, the driver asks where he’s travelling to and the answer is Alaska (the nickname of which, according to Wikipedia, is ‘The Last Frontier’).
The film is far from subtle in its illustrations of the problems of communication. On a car ferry crossing from the family home Bobby tries to talk to Catherine and the horns of other cars drown out their voices. The climactic scene between Bobby and his speechless father is conceived as a very obvious expression of the two generations’ inability to talk to each other. What’s wonderful about Jack Nicholson in this sequence is that you feel his awareness of its falseness at the outset and that he’s forcing himself to become emotional – but he works himself in so successfully that the emotion eventually seems genuine. (What’s even better is that you can believe this corresponds with the character’s emotional trajectory in this interview.) Rafelson’s and Eastman’s reluctance to allow people a surprising or attractive side is frustrating because their more generous moments are often convincing. It’s good, for example, that Billy Green Bush’s Elton, although he seems at first like a thick slob with a loud, stupid laugh, turns out to be a relatively responsible family man – certainly to an extent that’s beyond the intelligent Bobby. Rayette keeps on appealing to Bobby, ingratiating herself so relentlessly that he’s bound to get mad. What’s best about Karen Black’s playing of the part is that she gives you a sense that Rayette knows this is what’s going to happen – and that if she causes Bobby to lose his temper she can then enjoy the process of making up. (It’s not easy to believe, however, that this relationship has survived even for as long as a few months – especially as Bobby doesn’t seem to enjoy being with Rayette even in bed.) There are other actors in the cast – particularly Ralph Waite, Lois Smith and Susan Anspach – who are also ready to seize their rare opportunities to show new facets to their characters.
At the end of the picture, when Bobby and Rayette stop at a petrol station, he goes into the gents while she’s doing some shopping and divests himself of his jacket and his wallet. The lorry-driver from whom he gets a lift asks if he hasn’t any luggage: Bobby explains that he lost everything but the clothes he’s wearing in a fire. He refuses the driver’s offer of a coat. When the man asks if he’s OK, Bobby replies, ‘I’m fine … I’m fine … I’m fine’. (This is the last line in the script.) The melancholy ‘depth’ of the film is more in its images than its words, however: dark industrial machinery against a harshly bright sky in the oil fields; Bobby pushing his father’s wheelchair along the horizon (like a modernised detail from the dance of death in The Seventh Seal); the final, bleak shot at the gas station, as the timber lorry drives off and Rayette wanders out into in the forecourt to find Bobby’s vacant car.
In spite of what it now seems to share with the 1950s cinema of angry disillusionment, there are aspects of Five Easy Pieces that still place it firmly in time at the cusp of the sixties and the seventies. The team behind the picture is an example of Americans of the period who wanted to do work more akin to European art movies than to ‘old’ Hollywood. The people who made Bonnie and Clyde three years earlier were highly aware of the French New Wave influences they were drawing on yet they managed to create what still seems a genuinely original film. In comparison, the screenplay and direction of Five Easy Pieces seem derivative, and sometimes weakly derivative. (The hitch-hikers episode is a pinch from Wild Strawberries but, in terms of tension and complexity, it seems, relative to Bergman, like something out of a comedy sketch show.) Even so, its sense of independence is what appeals about the film at this distance in time. Rafelson and Eastman may have tapped into the zeitgeist but at least they made a picture without seeming to hedge their bets. It makes you nostalgic for an era when American directors were able to make films that they wanted to make, and get them seen by large numbers of people, without being too concerned about what the audience and box-office reactions would be.
22 February 2010