![]() While the film dissects the protagonists’ real and chosen families, trying to combine a sociological (social class) and psychological (identity, psyche), it still follows mainstream Hollywood by locating the narrative’s crises and (ambiguous) resolutions within the individual himself, thus embracing the more prevalent psychologistic perspective. Among them is Palm Apodaca (Helena Kallianiotes), a bitter lesbian hitchhiker obsessed with filth and headed with her lover to Alaska, where it’s cleaner, because as she says, “there are no men there.” Along the journey, some colorful and eccentric characters are introduced. “Five Easy Pieces” also serves as a road movie. ![]() We learn that Bobby had escaped from his suffocating bourgeois family, headed by Nicholas Dupeau (William Challee), his patronizing concert-artist father, who live with daughter Tita (full name is Partita, played by Lois Smith), a dowdy, scatter-brained, concert artist.īack at his folks house, Bobby jilts his pregnant mistress for his brother Carl’s fiancee, Catherine von Oost (Susan Anspach), a cool, high-cultured, and suave lady who’s in fact phony and pretentious.Īfter the father suffers a stroke, hiding his emotions, Bobby says: “I’m sorry it did not work out.” In South California, Bobby lives with Rayette in a dreary apartment in a drab working-class milieu. Jack Nicholson plays Bobby Dupea (his full name is Robert Eroica), an upper-middle class dropout, who now works as oil rigger in the California fields, spending his leisure time in bowling alleys and beer pubs with his girlfriend waitress Rayette Dipesto (Karen Black), before taking a trip up North to visit his family. Considering that the film was about alienation, marked by a pessimistic mood, and influenced by European filmmaking in approach and style, the movie was remarkably popular at the box-office, benefiting from the success of the a cycle of youth movies at the time. One of the few honest American films about social class, downward mobility, family, and alienation, “Five Easy Pieces” is more of a character and mood piece than a straightforward, plot-driven narrative. The opening credits enlist the five classical piano pieces played out (by credited pianist Pearl Kaufman) and referenced in the film’s title (See below, music section)Ĭombining elements of the road movie, which captures the vistas of the North West with the more universal theme of “search for identity,” Five Easy Pieces may be too self-conscious in trying to be a new, modernist tale about eccentric characters, laced with some absurdist-satirical humor, and determined to have a more open and ambiguous ending, lacking the more conventional morality of Classic Hollywood Cinema. More significantly, it established Jack Nicholson (born in 1937), fresh off from his success in Easy Rider (for which he received a Best Supporting Actor nomination, his first of 13 subsequent nods) the previous year, as the foremost actor of his generation, alongside with the slightly younger Al Pacino (ne in 1940) and Robert De Niro (1943).Īdrien Joyce, who co-wrote the script with director Rafelson, said she had based the chief character partly on her impressions of Jack Nicholson himself and partly on her own dead brother. A key American film of an era that’s considered now to be Hollywood’s last Golden Age (1967-1975), Five Easy Pieces, Bob Rafelson’s superlative character study, won the Best Picture from the New York Film Critics Circle.
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