5 EASY PIECES MOVIE
5 EASY PIECES FULL

Rafelson and his producing partner Bert Schneider first made their mark in Hollywood with the absurdist rock ’n’ roll sitcom The Monkees, then decided to make good use of any clout they’d built up with their Raybert Productions (later renamed BBS after Stephen Blauner joined the team). Even the moment where Bobby’s real roots are revealed isn’t treated as a big surprise. Yet Rafelson never overreaches for any emotional impact or thematic clarification. Meanwhile, cinematographer László Kovács shifts the lighting to capture the contrast between the grubby plainness of Bobby’s life in California and the dark, stifling tastefulness of his Washington home, helping establish why he feels out of place in both. Nicholson’s tightly wound performance is absorbing even when it’s unclear where it’s headed, and there’s an enjoyable musicality to Eastman’s dialogue, which captures both the priggishness of the Dupea family (whose Partita delivers pronouncements like, “This piano has absolutely no objectionable idiosyncrasies”) and the inventive vulgarity of Bobby (who snarls lines like, “Where the hell do you get the ass to tell anybody anything about class… you pompous celibate?”). Every minute of Five Easy Pieces is entertaining.

Director Bob Rafelson-who also conceived the story, and hired his friend Carole Eastman to write the script-attempts something unusual here, making a film that’s subtle about its meaning without ever ranging into the pretentiously oblique or merely ambiguous.

5 EASY PIECES MOVIE

One of the reasons Five Easy Pieces’ diner scene is so misleading is because there’s no one stretch of this movie that fairly represents the whole. So he and Rayette drive up to his family estate in Washington, where it becomes obvious that Bobby’s upbringing was hardly blue-collar. But then Bobby goes to see his classical-pianist sister Partita (Lois Smith), who tells him their father is ill. Bobby starts out working in the California oil fields by day and spending his nights getting drunk with a redneck co-worker-that is, when he’s not fooling around with any woman who isn’t his needy, baby-talking girlfriend Rayette (Karen Black). He’s no moody youngster or lovesick fool, or anyone’s deconstructed idea of a pulp hero. Nicholson’s Dupea embodies the self-destructive dissatisfaction that was common to a lot of movie characters in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but his unhappiness resonates more, because he isn’t the kind of person that usually gets movies made about him. Back in the car, one of the women applauds Bobby for standing up for himself, and he mumbles, “But I didn’t get my toast, did I?”įive Easy Pieces is the very definition of a character study, and one of the best American cinema has produced.

Besides, the most important part of this tantrum is what happens after, in a follow-up scene that never makes it into the New Hollywood clip-reels.

5 EASY PIECES FULL

The rest of Five Easy Pieces isn’t as comedic or as full of overt conflict, and two of the women eating with Bobby only showed up in the movie five minutes earlier, and will be gone five minutes later. (“You want me to hold the chicken, huh?” “I want you to hold it between your knees.”) Out of context, the scene is deceptive. Even film buffs who’ve never seen Five Easy Pieces are likely familiar with the image of Jack Nicholson as Bobby Dupea, sitting in a diner and snapping at an unhelpful waitress, telling her to bring him a chicken-salad sandwich with no chicken, so he can have the toast. The most famous scene in Five Easy Pieces reveals very little of what the movie is actually about, but everything about who.

5 easy pieces