Five Easy Pieces (1970) Review
8/10
Bobby Dupea works on a California oil rig, drinks, bowls, and lives with a waitress who loves him and whom he can’t stand. He learns his father has had a stroke and drives north to an island in Puget Sound where his family play chamber music.
Few films have left me this uneasy about enjoying a character. Nicholson makes Bobby funny, sharp and magnetic, and the film keeps showing me the damage he leaves behind until the charm curdles. I admire it enormously, and I wouldn’t want to spend an evening with anyone in it.
The 8 is for a character study with the nerve to refuse redemption. Bobby is somebody who ruins whatever he’s inside, and the film declines to explain why or to fix it.
What holds it below a 9 is the treatment of Rayette. It’s close to cruel. The film understands that Bobby’s contempt for her is the worst thing about him and it also asks the audience to find her tiresome, and those two positions don’t sit comfortably together.
The Diner Scene Is Misremembered
Bobby orders toast by asking for a chicken salad sandwich with the chicken held between the customer’s knees, having been told there are no substitutions. The waitress throws them out. It’s the most quoted American film scene of its decade and it’s almost always remembered as a triumph. A man defeats petty bureaucracy with wit and the audience cheers. That’s not what the film thinks. The scene ends with them on the pavement, nothing achieved, no toast, and his friend admiring him while the woman he humiliated goes back to work. Bobby has spent considerable energy to lose.
That misreading is the film’s central irony and it’s followed the picture for fifty years. People remember the cleverness and forget that the character is a man who can’t stop making situations worse for the pleasure of being the cleverest person in them.
Carole Eastman wrote it, under a pen name, and the screenplay was nominated. The writing is unusually good at giving minor characters a complete manner in a handful of lines, and the waitress in that diner is a fully drawn person in about forty seconds of screen time. That’s a large part of the reason the whole of that scene still works as well as it does more than fifty years after the fact.
The chicken salad line makes me laugh, and I think that’s the trap. The film wants me enjoying Bobby’s cleverness right up until I notice the waitress who has to go back to work.
A scene the audience is likely to misread is a risk worth taking if the story corrects it later, and this one does, repeatedly. The correction is that we watch him do the same thing to people who matter.
The technique requires you to place the charm early and the cost late. If the reader meets the cruelty first, the wit reads as unpleasant and the character has no pull.
Be aware that the misreading may win anyway. Fifty years of quotation have detached this scene from the film. That’s what happens when the cleverest moment is also the most extractable one.
Two Lives and He Fits Neither
The first forty minutes are oil fields, bowling alleys and motels. The next hour is a large house on an island with a string quartet rehearsing upstairs. The structure’s purpose is to establish that he’s a tourist in both. On the rig he’s performing a working man and everybody can tell. At home he plays a Chopin prelude beautifully and tells the woman listening that he felt nothing while playing it. That line is the character in one sentence. He’s capable, he knows he’s capable, and the capability produces nothing he values. That leaves contempt as the only available response to anybody who admires him for it. Susan Anspach plays the woman who admires him, his brother’s fiancee, and she’s the one person in the film who sees him accurately. Her assessment near the end, that he’s no love for himself or for anything, is delivered without heat and is the only judgment the picture endorses.
Jack Nicholson at thirty-three is doing the best work of his career and the least showy. The rage is present in every scene and surfaces perhaps three times, and the rest of the time it’s a man being pleasant while looking for an exit.
The piano on the flatbed is the image the film is built on. Stuck in traffic, he climbs onto a truck carrying an upright, and plays Chopin while the vehicle pulls off the freeway and drives away with him on it. He’s doing the thing he’s best at, in the wrong place, for nobody, and going somewhere he didn’t intend.
The flatbed piano is my favorite image in the film. It’s funny, lovely and sad in the same breath, and I’d put it beside the diner as the moment everybody ought to remember from this picture.
The Scene With His Father
The father can’t speak or move. Bobby wheels him out to a field and tries to explain himself to a man who can’t respond and may not be listening.
It’s the best scene in the film and among the best of the decade. He starts formally, gets angry, apologizes, tries again, and eventually admits that he moves around because he stops feeling good about himself if he stays anywhere. Nicholson plays it with his face turned away for most of it, breaking down in a manner that’s visibly embarrassing to him, and the sequence ends with him wiping his eyes and saying nothing further.
The film’s cruelty is that it changes nothing. He leaves the next day. Whatever the confession cost him, it bought no alteration in what he does afterward. That’s what makes it honest instead of cathartic.
This is the scene that justifies the 8 for me. Nicholson turning his face away while he falls apart is about as brave as screen acting gets, and I respect the film for refusing to let the confession change him by the next morning.
A confession to somebody who can’t respond removes every social mechanism the character would normally hide behind, and it’s the most efficient way to get the truth out of a person who evades.
The structural requirement is that the confession mustn’t fix anything. If your character says the true thing and then behaves differently, you’ve written therapy, and readers correctly distrust it.
Look for the listener who can’t react. A coma, a grave, a locked door or a one-way window forces honesty and denies absolution. That’s the combination that produces the scene.
Rayette Is the Problem
Karen Black plays a waitress who loves Bobby, isn’t his intellectual equal, plays country records he despises, and follows him north because he can’t bring himself to say no clearly.
The performance is superb and was nominated, and the film’s attitude toward her is the one thing that’s aged badly. It presents her as embarrassing, and the film stages the dinner party where his family’s circle patronizes her so the audience winces on his behalf as much as hers. The film knows this is Bobby’s failing. When a woman at that table condescends to Rayette, he defends her savagely, and the defense is the only decent thing he does in the film.
But the camera agrees with him more than the script admits. She’s shot as an encumbrance, and a version of this story from her point of view would be a different and possibly better film.
I part company with the film over Rayette. Karen Black gives her real warmth, and the camera treats her like luggage anyway. I’d have given her one scene of her own, away from Bobby, and I suspect that single scene would have pushed this to a 9.
The two hitchhikers are the film’s other misjudgment and its funniest stretch. A woman delivers an uninterrupted monologue about filth for several minutes, and the film is laughing at her in a way it doesn’t laugh at anybody in the house on the island.
The Ending Is the Coldest Thing in It
They stop at a service station. Bobby leaves Rayette in the car, gives his wallet away, and gets into a truck heading north with no coat. The camera holds on the forecourt for a long time. She comes out, doesn’t find him, and the film ends on a wide shot of a road in the rain.
That’s one of the great endings and it’s unpleasant. He abandons a pregnant woman at a petrol station without a word, and the film doesn’t editorialize, condemn or explain.
Bob Rafelson holds the shot long enough that the audience has time to understand what has happened and to consider what happens to her next, which the film has no intention of telling us. It was made at BBS, the small company that also produced Easy Rider, and belongs to the same brief period when studios were funding films with no third act in the conventional sense. Both pictures end on a road and neither resolves anything, and within five years that kind of financing had gone.
An ending that shows a consequence for somebody other than the protagonist is a way of judging him without stating a judgment. The camera stays where he’s not.
Length makes the difference. A quick cut after he leaves would be an event, and holding on the empty forecourt converts it into an abandonment the audience has to sit inside. Never explain the final act. The reader is going to construct what happens next, and whatever they build will be worse and more specific than anything you could write.
Should you watch Five Easy Pieces?
Yes, and go in knowing it’s colder than its reputation.
I think it’s a great film about a man I’d cross the street to avoid, with Nicholson doing his best work and an ending that hits like a slap. The diner is a man losing an argument he started, the confession in the field changes nothing, and the last shot is a gas station in the rain with somebody standing in it alone. What keeps it at an 8 is how little the film cares about Rayette.
