Five Easy Pieces Photos on the Wall
I n This is Spinal Tap, Nigel Tufnel, the lead guitarist of the world's loudest rock band, surprises the film's director, Marty DiBergi, with a delicate piano composition that seems far removed from the heavy-metal sludge of songs like Hell Hole, Sex Farm, and Big Bottom. Nigel refers to it as a "Mach" piece – a fusion of Mozart and Bach – and intends it as part of a musical trilogy in D minor, which he calls "the saddest of all keys". DiBergi thinks the piece is beautiful and asked him what it's called. Nigel stops chewing his gum momentarily and deadpans: "Oh, this piece is called Lick My Love Pump."
Perhaps the similarities are merely coincidental, but the most important scene in Five Easy Pieces plays out in essentially the same way. Only here it's Jack Nicholson behind the keys as Bobby Dupea, doing a soulful rendition of Chopin's Prelude in E Minor, which at a minimum sounds like the second saddest of all keys. Though part of an upper-class family of classical musicians, Bobby hasn't sat on a piano bench since returning to home to Puget Sound, Washington, but he's willing to make an exception for his brother's fiancee, Catherine (Susan Anspach), because he wants to get laid. (That's another thing he and a rock musician like Nigel have in common.)
The performance moves Catherine to tears, just as Bobby intended, but her reaction stirs the contempt and self-loathing that's always simmering below the surface. He tells her it's the easiest piece he could think of, and that he played it better when he was eight years old. If she believes it reflects some heretofore masked inner feeling, she is mistaken. "I faked a little Chopin," he says. "You faked a big response." That doesn't mean Catherine is wrong to notice some flicker of soul in that moment – later scenes reveal that he really does feel something for her – but Bobby has spent his adult life trying to extinguish it. He won't allow her to see the real him, whoever that might be.
Fifty years later, Five Easy Pieces still puts us in Catherine's shoes, puzzling over this charismatic mess of a human being. After spending the better part of the 60s stealing scenes in independent films like Little Shop of Horrors and Easy Rider, Jack Nicholson announced himself as a leading man with Bobby Dupea – and, in turn, introduced a decade where flawed characters like him were possible. In the hands of a lesser actor – or even a very good actor – Bobby could come off as a sour, abusive drip, unworthy of our interest, much less our sympathy. But Nicholson plays the audience like Bobby doing Prelude in E Minor, utterly confident that he'll seduce us into caring about a man who's incapable of returning the love he attracts so effortlessly.
The timing of Five Easy Pieces is uncanny, coming just after a decade spent by Nicholson in independent cinema – before he was truly ready to infiltrate Hollywood in the 70s. Though the film was distributed by Columbia Pictures, the production company behind it – then called Raybert Productions and later known as BBS Productions (for producers Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider and Stephen Blaunder) – was a flag-bearer for New Hollywood, which would import the exciting, iconoclastic work coming out of Europe at the time. Rafelson, who directed, and the screenwriter Adrien Joyce (AKA Carole Eastman), who had written The Shooting for Nicholson and the director Monte Hellman three years earlier, made a film of almost radical modesty, a character study with the richness and interiority of a great novel.
And as with all great novels, it's the smallest details that matter. The earliest scenes in Five Easy Pieces set the parameters of Bobby's blue-collar life around the oilfields of Kern county, California: the grueling physicality of working on a rig; his contentious domestic life with Rayette (Karen Black), a waitress he's comfortable mistreating; a bowling outing during which he insults Rayette while flirting shamelessly with the women in an adjacent lane. It isn't until later, when he meets his sister Tita (Lois Smith) at a recording studio in Los Angeles, that we learn that he's running from his past as a classical pianist of impressive musical stock. When Bobby learns that his distant father has suffered a debilitating stroke, he makes the drive to Puget Sound for a visit. But he's so intent on separating his past from his present that he deposits Rayette in a motel and heads to the island alone.
The big standalone scene seems like an anomaly, with Bobby castigating a waitress for not allowing him to order a simple side of toast with his omelet. His workaround for the restaurant's "no substitutions" policy is to ask for a chicken salad sandwich sans everything – "I want you to hold it between your knees," he says of the chicken – and he winds up sweeping the waters across the table in frustration. It's a funny moment in a film with few of them, but it's also Bobby in a nutshell: it's no coincidence that he's directing his anger toward a woman who shares his girlfriend's occupation. It's not out of character for him to combust so dramatically. And, in the end, he doesn't even get the toast he wanted.
But who knows what he wants? Bobby operates by impulse, which allows him to chase short-term desires like bedding women and getting toast with his omelet, but leaves him existentially adrift. Unlike the restlessness in a film like Easy Rider, which looks dangerous and cool and a lot like freedom, Five Easy Pieces is about the terrible uncertainty of being unmoored from any kind of satisfying life. The masterful closing sequence, like an elegant short story in itself, leaves the impression that Bobby will never find one, either. It's possible to see Five Easy Pieces as representing the fallout after a turbulent decade – akin to the "what now?" final shot of The Graduate – but that would deny the specificity of a film that actively resists making statements. If it was representative of anything, it was the potential of what American film could be.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/sep/12/five-easy-pieces-at-50-jack-nicholson-american-film
0 Response to "Five Easy Pieces Photos on the Wall"
Post a Comment