Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 11-July-04
Spoiler Rating: Low

Five Easy Pieces (1970)

When "Five Easy Pieces" opens, we find Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson) deep in the rut of a blue collar life. He spends his days in an oil field and his nights (mostly) with a dimwitted, cloying waitress named Rayette (Karen Black), measuring success by the amount of booze, sex, and bowling he can fit into his spare time. Like most such men, he has his highs and lows, his bouts with anger and glee. But unlike most such men, Bobby Dupea knows another way of relating to the world. Only hinted at first, this becomes apparent when he heads north from California to Washington to pay a visit to his dying father. Then Bobby's other life is revealed, one of deliberate refinement from which he has tried to escape. Seeing the two worlds of Bobby Dupea, we learn enough to build a complete picture of the man, which is really what the movie is about. Like his cinematic descendants (Gilbert Grape, Igby Slocumb, et al.), Bobby needs to get away from his family to discover himself, and yet, true to the era that spawned him, his need doesn't dictate his fate.

"Five Easy Pieces" develops significant personalities but requires the viewer to fill in holes and draw conclusions on his or her own. Bobby's movement, complete with some classic road trip scenes,* provides the illusion of a story arc, but the film aims to expose his nature more than an especially important period in his life. Thus it may be somewhat disquieting to a modern audience used to a beginning, an end, and a scarcity of lingering questions such as why? (or the big one for me, what does the title mean?). But the movie and its protagonist leave a distinct impression that has everything to do with character and nothing to do with plot.

Indeed, any of the people in Bobby's life might merit the lift-the-hood-and-look-inside treatment. The ultimate ditzy blonde, Rayette elicits a simultaneous impulse toward laughter, tenderness, and cruelty, while the Dupea household abounds with doozies: in addition to the now-vegetative patriarch and his ex-sailor caretaker, there's sister Partita (Lois Smith), who seems half woman, half child; brother Carl (Ralph Waite), who doesn't have a clue that he's a gigantic nerd; and Carl's lover and protégé Catherine (Susan Anspach), who views and approves them all with unclouded vision. It's an eccentric assembly, to be sure (which director Bob Rafelson highlights with a shot from "You Can't Take It With You"), but it's hardly the kind of home to send one screaming out into the world desperate for freedom and release.

And yet it is, for Bobby Dupea. Nicholson's fabulously natural performance never diminishes Bobby's faults, just as the movie never attempts to make him a victim of his lineage. He is, simply, a man who cannot stand the choices he sees before him and so flounders around looking for alternatives (or, to be more accurate, opportunities for not choosing anything in particular). It's not absolutely clear what repulses him so much domestically, but shadows of his motivation appear when he addresses the artistic nature that defines his family. It's as if the musical training he received as a child gave him a craving for beauty and perfection without a tempering ability to accept anything less. To devote oneself to the violin or the piano (or another person) as his brother and sister are able to do necessitates a degree of risk that Bobby isn't strong enough to bear. He cannot be a passionate virtuoso like them and he cannot be an insensitive working-class boor; he can only keep moving, looking for some kind of meaning.

It makes sense that Bobby Dupea's story begins on the West Coast, because "Five Easy Pieces" suggests that he is running out of places in which to find answers. The movie doesn't spell out exactly what lies behind or ahead of him, but it gives one the feeling of a person who will never have a home for never knowing where his heart is.

*I think there should be a recognized movie sub-genre called "Front Seat-Back Seat Conversations," to which I proffer scenes from this movie, "Bonnie and Clyde," and "The Sure Thing" as classic examples.

Copyright © 2004 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.