The title character, played by Jack Nicholson, is named Robert Eroica Dupea. The five easy pieces of the title refer to piano compositions he played as a boy. Music lessons together with a middle name that refers to Beethoven's Third Symphony might make you wonder about the household of origin. But Dupea has left it behind. He has a dirty job in an oil field and lives with his girlfriend. He drinks, bowls, cheats on the girlfriend, and watches television in the trailer home of his friend. The camera does not deprive you of views of freeways, landscapes of parking lots and roadside motels, and the insides of cheap diners. That is pretty much the first half.
The second half starts when Dupea learns that his father is very ill. He travels back to the household of origin and finds that his mute dying father is attended to by a laconic weightlifter who is bedding his rather homely sister. Meanwhile a brother, a violinist, has "sprained his neck" and wears a goofy-looking brace that nevertheless has not prevented him from becoming the lover of an attractive hippie who has settled into the household, appropriately located on an island. They all work on their music and occasionally an intellectual drops by to hold forth on some topic. Dupea tries to persuade the hippie girl to switch brothers, succeeds a little, then fails. He tries to talk with his mute father but the old man is too far gone. Dupea had picked up some hitchhiking gargoyles along the way but were they any crazier than these characters?
The organization of the movie invites you to compare the world Dupea rejected to the one he found with the motels and parking lots and freeways and oil fields. His own vote seems to be thumbs down on both. On the way back home, he stops for gas, and the girlfriend walks off to the diner next to the station for a coffee. Dupea studies himself in the mirror of the station's men's room. When he comes out, a truck hauling timber has pulled in. The camera only shows, and from a distance, the conversation in which the necessary agreements are made, then, as Dupea takes his seat beside the driver, pulls away even farther as the truck moves out into the highway and turns the opposite direction from which Dupea had been going in the car with his girlfriend. The camera continues to dwell on the crumby little gas station after the truck has disappeared and you can only hear the sound of its changing gears. The end.
With Karen Black, as Dupea's girlfriend, and everyone will recognize Sally Struthers. Bob Rafelson directs. The scene in the diner is so famous that it seems to have stopped people from realizing that "Five Easy Pieces" is one of the very best American pictures.
Comments