Five Easy Pieces (1970) Review

Bobby Dupea works on a California oil rig, drinks, bowls, and lives with a waitress who loves him and whom he cannot stand. He learns his father has had a stroke and drives north to an island in Puget Sound where his family play chamber music.

The 8 is for a character study with the nerve to refuse redemption. Bobby is not a good man who has lost his way. He is somebody who ruins whatever he is inside, and the film declines to explain why or to fix it.

What holds it below a 9 is the treatment of Rayette, which is 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 do not 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 is the most quoted American film scene of its decade and it is almost always remembered as a triumph. A man defeats petty bureaucracy with wit and the audience cheers.

That is 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 has followed the picture for fifty years. People remember the cleverness and forget that the character is a man who cannot 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, which is 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.

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 is a tourist in both. On the rig he is 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 is capable, he knows he is capable, and the capability produces nothing he values, which 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 is the one person in the film who sees him accurately. Her assessment near the end, that he has 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 is 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 is doing the thing he is best at, in the wrong place, for nobody, and going somewhere he did not intend.

The Scene With His Father

The father cannot speak or move. Bobby wheels him out to a field and tries to explain himself to a man who cannot respond and may not be listening.

It is the best scene in the film and one of 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 is 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, which is what makes it honest instead of cathartic.

Rayette Is the Problem

Karen Black plays a waitress who loves Bobby, is not his intellectual equal, plays country records he despises, and follows him north because he cannot 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 has aged badly. It presents her as embarrassing, and the dinner party where his family’s circle patronizes her is staged 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 is shot as an encumbrance, and a version of this story from her point of view would be a different and possibly better film.

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 does not 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, does not find him, and the film ends on a wide shot of a road in the rain.

That is one of the great endings and it is genuinely unpleasant. He abandons a pregnant woman at a petrol station without a word, and the film does not 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.

Should you watch Five Easy Pieces?

Yes, and go in knowing it is colder than the reputation. The diner scene is a man losing an argument he started, the confession in the field changes nothing, and the last shot is a petrol station in the rain with somebody standing in it alone.

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