Five Easy Pieces

Five Easy Pieces is the nominal sibling to Easy Rider, which put Jack Nicholson a step from stardom in 1969. But Pieces, this 40th-anniversary reissue reminds you, was a very different film. The soundtrack is Patsy Cline, not Steppenwolf, and we first see Nicholson working in a hard hat, the music and garb of pro-‘Nam hippie-bashers in 1970. But the cultural action is mostly in Nicholson himself, and the simmering storm of dissatisfaction and high intelligence in his odd-angled, lean face, not often inclined here to split into that trademark super-smile.

Director Bob Rafelson and producer Bert Schneider co-founded BBS, the production company which with the two Easys helped found the New Hollywood wave. Carole Eastman’s Five Easy Pieces screenplay shows how much freedom they carved open, as American cinema all too briefly grew up. Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea is first seen working on a Californian oilrig, hanging out at 10-pin bowling alleys and bars with dumb girlfriend Ray (Karen Black). But he quits and reluctantly returns east, pregnant Ray in tow, to the island home of his upper-middle-class family of oddball intellectuals, where his father is mute and dying; the life which, along with his talent as a classical pianist and much else, he’s running from. The current sub-genre skewering such untypically Hollywood bourgeoisie – Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding, Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums – starts here. When Bobby’s family gathers round the dinner table, Dad silenced and near-dead at its head, you may also recall The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s monstrous family and zombified patriarch, surrounding their latest victim at supper.

Rafelson was crucial in creating Nicholson the movie star, also collaborating on the even better King of Marvin Gardens (1972), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), Man Trouble (1992) and what Rafelson agreed when we spoke on release was the “terminal” Blood and Wine (1996); Rafelson’s final feature to date.

Wearing a red jacket and blue jeans in his early scenes, Nicholson’s Bobby explicitly recalls James Dean in Rebel without a Cause. Rafelson frames and lights him lovingly, as if he’s already iconic. But Nicholson is in his thirties, hair receded too far for a Fifties quiff or long hippie locks. There’s the bitterness in his rebel spirit of a man who’s run up against life’s limitations before we ever met him. He’s not the faux-rock’n’roll, triumphant rebel against nothing very much New Hollywood was quickly watered down to. In the climactic moments of his early, core work -  The Last Detail (1973), Chinatown (1974), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) – he utterly fails to avert proof of life’s unfairness, when an innocent dies. The mumbling inarticulacy Dean and Brando fed into American youth culture, through Kurt Cobain to today’s all-purpose “whatever”, isn’t Nicholson’s. That wannabe working-class red jacket is soon shucked for the casual suits of his own, over-articulate class in Five Easy Pieces; you can see the angry words he holds in with suffering forbearance, between lacerating, manic outbursts.

The set-piece everyone remembers and identifies with is when he tries to mildly tweak the set menu at a diner with a waitress (pictured below left). “I want you to hold the chicken...and put it between your legs,” he rants, before swiping the table clear. It seems petty now, and rigged for audience approval. But Nicholson’s Bobby is also slashing uselessly at all the small, unfixable wrongs we feel hobbling us.

There’s a great deal of contempt in this movie, especially for women (though not as much as in Nicholson’s next film, Mike Nichols’s post-war misogyny master class Carnal Knowledge). “Ya know if ya wouldn’t open your mouth, everything would be just fine,” Bobby says to Karen Black’s long-suffering, pregnant girlfriend. Like the waitress, Toni Basil’s verbally incontinent hippie hitch-hiker Terry Grouse, and Cuckoo’s Nest’s Nurse Ratched later, women can be castrating. It’s the same old riff of young American men from On the Road on, who feel they’re free spirits with the keys to the kingdom, if only chicks and responsibilities wouldn’t drag them back. Carole Eastman’s script, though, gives Ray dignified ripostes, and the men are no better, priapic Bobby least of all. Even when he finally defends Ray from his family’s contempt, he does so en route to battering the door of his brother’s fiancée Catherine, who he’s been fucking on the side.

This is an impishly funny film, perkily edited with the quick cuts of the decade-old French Nouvelle Vague New Hollywood adored. But we feel Bobby’s tragedy. When he plays Chopin to impress Catherine (one of the “easy pieces”), the camera pans to photos of Nicholson as a truly young man - handsome, smiling, smart. “Auspicious beginnings, y’know what I mean,” he mutters, knowing he was “never really that good” at the piano, even the myth of the prodigal artist a tatty fraud. He’s talking to his unresponsive, meaninglessly smiling old father, moved to helpless tears in a soliloquy Nicholson, raised fatherless, partly wrote.

Bobby just can’t stick. He’s restless and hopeless, last seen heading somewhere hellishly cold. This is what happens when rebels almost grow up, a postscript to Easy Rider’s counter-culture heroes the very next year. Five Easy Pieces isn’t quite the imperishable classic of reputation. But its interest in non sequiturs, minor observations and adult foibles make it part of New Hollywood’s auspicious beginnings, which, like Bobby, ended up nowhere much. And what I keep thinking about after seeing it again is Jack Nicholson’s burning, useless dissatisfaction, which still fuels him 40 years on.

• Five Easy Pieces opens on Friday at BFI Southbank, Filmhouse Edinburgh, Irish Film Institute, Ritzy Brixton, Tyneside Cinema Newcastle and key cities
  
• Find Five Easy Pieces on Amazon

Watch the Five Easy Pieces trailer: