OVP: Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Film: Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Susan Anspach, Lois Smith, Ralph Waite
Director: Bob Rafelson
Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Picture, Actor-Jack Nicholson, Supporting Actress-Karen Black, Original Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

It's always a little bit odd to see Jack in a film before Cuckoo's Nest, when he started his slow descent into the crazy, wild-eyed cartoon that we know-and-admire from The Shining or Batman.  Before that, while he always had that signature intensity and a carnality in his onscreen personas, he was still trying to prove himself as a genius for his generation, one of the truly great screen presences.  In many ways, this mirrors what happened to his Ironweed costar Meryl Streep, who also eventually became so famous and so identified with her offscreen persona that it became impossible for her to incarnate character acting roles.  Five Easy Pieces is one of the first films in Nicholson's legend as a great actor, coming a year after his big breakthrough in Easy Rider, and was his first nomination for Best Lead Actor at the Academy Awards, a category he'd compete in a total of eight times (to date).  The film has the feel of a 1970's classic, occasionally too lost and dated in the years since to land all of the punches it surely would have hit in 1970, but Nicholson is sensational as a little boy lost in the violent persona he's crafted in his adulthood.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers on Bobby Dupea (Nicholson), an oil rig worker with a brainy side, as he was once a child prodigy & classic pianist.  He spends his days cheating on his air-headed girlfriend Rayette (Black), who whines about the world while blasting Tammy Wynette records.  After finding out from his sister Partita (Smith) that their father has suffered two strokes and may soon die, Bobby returns back to the privileged place of his youth, where he begins to fall for his brother's fiance Catherine (Anspach).  Along the way, we start to learn about the world that Bobby abandoned, and the clear emotional scars a complicated relationship with his father have left him with, to the point where he doesn't seem capable of falling in love with a woman in the traditional sense.  The film ends brutally, with Catherine telling Bobby he's incapable of loving anyone, and then he proves her right by abandoning a pregnant Rayette at a truck stop while he heads as a hitchhiker up to Alaska, a callback to an earlier scene in the film where Toni Basil's Terry Grouse (yes, Toni Basil of "oh Mickey, you're so fine" fame) is discussing she and her friend's obsession with going to Alaska where it's "clean."

The film has a definite 1970's mold, with emotionally unavailable men trying to connect to a changing world.  Nicholson wasn't the only person who capitalized on this motif-Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, and Ryan O'Neal were all mining similar ground at this point to great success.  What sets Five Easy Pieces apart, then, is the ambiguity of the film, particularly its stronger second half.  There are scenes in the movie where you have to heavily understand what the script is giving you hints at.  Look at, say, the clear unrest in Lois Smith's work here-where she's so sexually repressed that she pursues a man she knows won't be good to her, an exact mirror of the relationship she has with every man in the film.  Or the sheer comic ridiculousness of Nicholson "fighting the man" in the form of Lorna Thayer's waitress in the movie's most famous sequence, the "chicken salad scene."  Or the very complicated, manipulative relationship that Rayette and Bobby have with each other, where you know they're destined to end up apart, but the way it happens lets them both find peace in a melancholy way.

The film struggles on occasion, and is hurt in the way that it looks at Bobby's philandering and abuse of Rayette as two-sided, when clearly it's more his fault that their relationship is poisoned.  Both actors received Oscar nominations for the film, and while it's easy to praise Nicholson's work here (the heartbreaking moment with his father, confessing things he's never said out loud to a man he was once terrified of but is now just a blank slate is jaw-dropping), I was mixed with Black's work.  She clearly embodies Rayette, but I feel like we keep going to the same well over-and-over, with the main moment at the end not being the moment we need it to be-she's expected to have not grown outwardly but grown inwardly, but to me she was still the same person at the beginning of the film.  It's easy to mix "good performance" with "I feel bad for her," and I think some of the praise for her work should fall into the latter camp even if people are claiming the former.  Black has some great moments ("I'm not a piece of crap") but her sole Oscar nomination left me mixed, even in a year of very eclectic nominees (I officially have seen all five of this year's nominated films, though I have little memory of Lee Grant in The Landlord).  The film is occasionally dated, but is one of the best of this style of "changing times" films I've seen, and one of Nicholson's most effective performances.  I'm not quite at 5-stars, but it deserves its perch as a "classic."