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Lost? Lonely? Have your years of education and privilege left you feeling empty and desperate for meaning, or have you ever thought of just throwing it all away because society has nothing to offer but a mild analgesic?
If so, you may be able to relate to Robert Dupea, the character Jack Nicholson plays in the movie Five Easy Pieces.
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This 1970 film by director Bob Rafelson is an early example of a long-running collaboration between Nicholson and Rafelson, including The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) and the well-received Blood and Wine (1996).
Nominated for Best Actor, Picture, and Writing awards, Five Easy Pieces achieves its ends largely without the use of plot.
Dupea focuses his attention on two very different women who provide an interesting dichotomy of class and maturity. It is this contrast – one related to the contrast between his upbringing and his present surroundings – which becomes the central theme of the movie and of Dupea’s psychological tensions. Karen Black (Nashville, Easy Rider) plays a white trash waitress and country music fan, while Susan Anspach (Play it Again, Sam) portrays a cultured classical pianist.
By the picture’s opening, Dupea has grown profoundly disillusioned with and alienated from the family life in which he was raised. Having rejected the social status of his family and the music of Chopin he was trained to play, he becomes a drifter with few attachments.
As the film begins, we see him working at what may be presumed to be just one in a long line of low-wage, high-labor jobs. He has tried to escape his past and his obligations, yet it soon becomes evident that a distaste for this new environment is ever-present as well.
When word comes to him of his father’s illness, he is drawn back into the world of his youth where his already confused values are thrown into further dismay. Part of him is, initially, eager to return, but the suffocating intellectual arrogance of his family and their friends turns his homecoming into a miserable experience.
The film provides a commentary on society, not via the main cast but rather through a highly unstable crash victim whom Dupea and his country-music lovin’ hillbilly girl pick up on their way to his family home. The hitchhiker rambles incessantly about the filth which pervades the world around her. America, it would seem, has become tainted and vulgarized beyond recognition. The only option she feels is left for her is the clean slate of Alaska.
Plot, as mentioned earlier, is not the strength of this movie. The power lies in the inner struggle of Nicholson’s character to reconcile his past and present actions.
Ultimately, Dupea is totally unsuccessful. His family’s happy life is disturbed by the intrusion of a hostile male nurse who seduced Dupea’s sister, and the happy home life presented by his oil-rig co-worker is shown to be illusory when the father is sent to prison for crimes from his past.
Finding solace nowhere, then, Dupea rejects his entire identity and embraces a nameless existence without any direction or purpose.
