Directed by Bob Rafelson. Written by Carole Eastman (as Adrien Joyce)
The inescapability of ourselves, as vessels for our trauma, misguided coping mechanisms and inability to face the music, is laid bare by Jack Nicholson as a wayward man not at all at ease in the world ever since he left his father’s home. You can run far and wide, director Bob Rafaelson says with this story of exhumed hurt, but wherever you go, there you’ll be.
Nicholson stars as Robert “Bobby” Eroica Dupea. A child piano prodigy, Bobby now risks his fingers as an oil field roughneck, earning a living the hard way and making life hard for those around him, most of all his girlfriend Rayette (Karen Black), desperate to love and be loved by Bobby but finding the endeavor like wringing blood from a stone. He’s only there in body, because he lives in fear of the reckoning there’ll be should his thoughts ever catch up. His current state is just another stop on a road trip of bad decisions that he’s been on a while.
Then there’s news from home: his father is ill. Two strokes. With Rayette precariously in tow, Bobby heads up to Washington state, fearful of the confrontation with what’s left of his papa, the social class he’s left in favor of blue collar horizons, his own past, and whatever went wrong back then.
Nicholson delivers an all-time great performance and one of his best as a man with no rudder and a typhoon of existential malaise bearing down on his sails. It’s electrifying, this portrait of a man wired with animosity that’s fed by self-hatred, lashing out at those who get too close and clutching at others like life rafts, his hands either balled into fists or desperately stretched out.
The raw furor and consequence of his behavior is a perennial house fire you can’t look away from, like watching something essential be violently undone, and anything that gets too close is at the very least worse for wear. Nicholson bares this man, who’s both bedeviled and bedeviling, with frightening force, but more than the simmering natural disaster his inner life is, Nicholson’s also just impressive on a technical level, as Bobby hides behind a multitude of masks, be it the surly toddler, life of the party jubilant, schmoozing pig, or, when the masks seem to finally fall away, a pained boy.
Literature and movies have had plenty of men like Bobby, like those superfluous men found in Russian literature, John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, or modern TV’s Don Draper. Whatever the case may be, these men just can’t seem to come to terms with themselves, but few of them present the stalemate with such ferocity as Nicholson does here.
It makes a riveting watch now, and all the more painful, because we’ve at least now come far enough to recognize the validity of therapy when it comes to men like this. But it’s 1970, and in Five Easy Pieces, Bobby will much rather move states, isolate himself, renege everything he’s embraced as part of his being, and, literally, leave everything behind – instead of just going to therapy. A dreadful archetype has never been more vivid, brazen, and captivating as it is in Five Easy Pieces.
Mikkel Frederiksen 