'Five Easy Pieces' (1970)
A retrospective movie review by Walter Frith
wfrith@cgocable.net
Member of the ‘Online Film Critics Society' http://ofcs.org/ofcs/
I guess Jack Nicholson must be good friends with director Bob Rafelson. As a director, Rafelson has made only 12 movies in 31 years and six of them have been with Jack and with the exception of 1997's 'Blood and Wine', I never really liked anything made by Rafelson and his films with Jack, aside from 'Blood and Wine' are 'Head' (1968), 'The King of Marvin Gardens' (1972), the remake of 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' (1981), 'Man Trouble' (1992) and, alas, 'Five Easy Pieces'.
I know this film has been hailed by people everywhere since it came out but the film just flat out did not draw me in. I didn't care about the people involved. It's clearly the type of film that needs a good music score and hardly has any score at all and no one in the cast seems to stand out besides Nicholson. What is remarkably disappointing about 'Five Easy Pieces' is the fact that the film is alarmingly flat. It has no zest and its only good point, as mentioned, is the commendable performance by Nicholson. As a confused young man with the gift of musical genius bottled up inside him, Nicholson gives a commanding performance that brought him his first Best Actor Oscar nomination. He lost the award to George C. Scott in 'Patton' but it remains the film that launched Nicholson's career and he would receive two other Oscar nominations ('The Last Detail', and 'Chinatown') before winning the prize in 1975 for 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'.
'Five Easy Pieces' is an enigma in the way it displays Nicholson's character and I did enjoy, somewhat, the way the film built itself up by revealing many traits of Nicholson's genius before we discover the family from hell that he left behind a long time ago. A recent survey of people across America in 1998 revealed that 71 per cent of them had started a new job within the last three years. The average person will change careers 10 times in their life and that number will probably grow as the faster the world will continue to turn faster and faster.
Nicholson's character is one with no focus. He resides with his live-in girlfriend (Karen Black), and their relationship is rather rocky and Nicholson wants to abandon the responsibility of marrying her like many of the other responsibilities he ran away from in his life. We discover that Nicholson had a gift for being a great pianist but gave it all up to work on an oil rig where he hates his boss and spars with his friend who is later dragged off by the authorities on suspicion of robbery. One scene has Nicholson hopping out of his friend's car and jumping on to the back of a moving truck where a piano is tied down and as the traffic begins to move, Nicholson stays on it, playing the instrument as it pulls onto a collector lane, leaving his friend behind. The most powerful scene in the film is the one where Nicholson explains to his father, who is confined to a wheelchair and can't speak, that he regretted abandoning the family after seeing how his father ended up.
In many ways 'Five Easy Pieces' reminded me more of a television movie than a big screen motion picture. This is the film that made Jack famous with his infamous "chicken salad sandwich speech" where he puts a waitress in her place when she refuses to bring him what he wants as she quips that it isn't on the menu. I think this is another example of a potentially great film made only average by an average director and while I feel it is only average, I can understand why others hail it as great---especially those fond of character studies.
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