![]() ![]() Rayette can’t bowl worth a darn, swinging her limbs wildly and probably endangering the lives of people a few lanes down, and instead of taking it in stride-y’know, telling oneself it’s drunk bowling-he gets mad at her when she hits a strike on her last ball. Bobby double dates at bowling with Elton, and it’s a great vessel to watch his inability to take it down from 11. (It doesn’t help that Rayette’s eyelashes are like the gone with the wind version of Shelley Duvall’s in Brewster McCloud.) His best friend on the oil rig, Elton (Billy Bush) is a fool as well, a father who is on the right track to make more babies with women he hasn’t settled down with, and Bobby encourages this wild infidelity. He knows Rayette is as dumb as a brick, keeps her around for the sex, and then makes her feel like a heel when she initiates contact. It is significantly more compelling to watch Bobby as he vents his spleen in tiny doses on the people around them. The scene where he has it out with the old man is something of a flop, really, one of those scenes you think have to be in the movie and which don’t add anything to it once they’re there. Nicholson plays a man who has simply lost the ability to find humor or grace in any situation, embittered by years of resentment directed at his father. (“You know the funny thing about Herman?…there’s nothing funny about Herman.”) Bobby lacks the animal humor one expects in Nicholson’s earthier roles, and this is certainly one of them. (At the very least there’s a whore-Madonna duality that is almost as threadbare in discussion as it is in narrative art forms, so we’ll leave off.) One doesn’t want to overstep that line of inquiry, seeing as Carole Eastman has the screenplay credit and shares the story credit with Rafelson all the same, genre and hindsight make for a potent cocktail, and knowing that this is Rafelson’s only bona fide classic gives the movie an extra patina of sadness.īobby reminds me of Herman from Cabaret. Women are divided into two categories in Five Easy Pieces-the ones Bobby can bang and the ones he can’t-and it’s a characterization that early ’70s Bob Rafelson might, if he were honest, have copped to in his own life. Even bit parts, like the comic one for Helena Kallianiotes, fall into repetitive notes almost at once, as if there’s nothing really behind that woman besides her obsession with cleanliness. Bobby’s sister Partita (Lois Smith) is a sister first and foremost, then a pseudo-mother to her dying father. Catherine (Anspach) is the good girl that difficult men like Bobby seem to be attracted to in movies like this one. Rayette (Black) is little more than a forerunner for Sueleen Gay in Nashville, although, funnily enough, Black sings much better as Rayette in this movie than she does as Connie White. Bobby (Nicholson) is not precisely a deep character, but we sure as heck are supposed to be more interested in him than we are in any of the women in the picture. It is one of the great films of New Hollywood, one of the great Nicholson performances, shot with pretended effortlessness, and in the story I think you can see the seeds of Rafelson’s own self-immolation. Five Easy Pieces is an American entry into “angry young man”-ism which twists the typically industrial roots of that very British genre into an upper-middle-class background for its protagonist. ![]() Starring Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Susan AnspachĪs much as any of the promising American directors of the early 1970s, Bob Rafelson was a victim of his own hype. ![]()
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