As I watched the Mariners absolutely shit the bed to begin the second half of the MLB season tonight, I couldn’t help but think of the main takeaway I had from rewatching Five Easy Pieces last night: expectations are a bitch. Now I didn’t remember this movie that well – it has been a decade since the first and only other time I saw it – I’m pretty sure my reaction to it was: boy, this Jack Nicholson guy is a dick. He’s surrounded by people who want to love him and he’s horrible to all of them. But now, I see it more as everyone wants him to live on their (honestly eminently reasonable) terms and he’s just not built that way. I still bristle at this character, but I see the internal tragedy better now.
Jack Nicholson plays Bobby Dupea, a hot mess who spends his days oil rigging and his nights drinking, bowling, and cheating. He’s got a pregnant girlfriend, waitress Rayette DiPesto (Karen Black), who desperately loves him, but Bobby mostly treats her as an annoyance. A lot of that shows up for his contempt in her constant singing and love for the music of Tammy Wynette (who the movie also loves, four of her songs are featured). It turns out that’s because Bobby is actually a trained classical pianist who ran away from that life but still secretly harbors tortured, snobby feelings about music. Those feelings come to the fore on a particularly nasty, post-hangover day when Bobby’s coworker, Elton (Billy Green Bush), gets arrested and Bobby quits the oil field.
Bobby dresses and up and heads into Los Angeles where he drops in on his sister Partita (Lois Smith) making a classical piano recording. She’s elated to see him and urges him to visit their father, who has suffered two strokes and lives in their family home on an island in the Puget Sound. Bobby agrees and plans to drive himself up, leaving Rayette behind, but she threatens to kill herself if he does, so he asks her to come along. They have some amusing misadventures with hitchhikers and an infamous diner scene (based on something Jack Nicholson really did) before Bobby ditches Rayette at a motel and goes to the house himself. There he will have to reckon with himself, his family, and his choices.
It’s hard not to watch Five Easy Pieces from Rayette’s perspective. She wants so little from him, just love and support and loyalty. And instead he’s constantly ditching her, berating her, even getting abusive with her. It sucks. When she runs out of money at the motel, Rayette comes to the Dupea estate and makes things awkward, despite her naturally endearing quality. Earlier in the movie, Bobby and Rayette go bowling with Elton and his wife and while everyone else is throwing strikes, Rayette keeps ending up in the gutter. So not only does Rayette embarrass Bobby with the upper crust, she struggles with his expectations for her in blue collar settings too. Nonetheless, she keeps trying. And so you just wish Bobby would wake the fuck up and start treating her right.
The thing is, I think he wishes he could too. There’s just something broken in Bobby where he either doesn’t think he’s good enough or believes he will ruin whatever situation he’s in, so he preemptively wrecks things deliberately and runs away. He runs away from the piano, his family, his job, his friendship with Elton, and, ultimately, Rayette. He just wants to be true to himself, but everywhere he ends up, he’s weighed down by the expectations people have for him to be the person they want him to be: the pianist, the loving son, the hard worker, the partner and father. He just can’t do it, there’s something broken in him.
The film’s title comes from the five classical piano pieces played in the film, one of which, Chopin’s Prelude in E minor, Op. 28, No. 4, Bobby plays for his brother’s girlfriend Catherine (Susan Anspach). When Catherine has an emotional reaction, he dismisses it, saying he played it better when he was eight years old. She counters that it was his feeling that moved her, he says he didn’t have any. And there’s the rub. Everyone else can see his aching but he can’t acknowledge it – or them. He’s doomed to live a hard, lonely life.
So yeah, Five Easy Pieces is a tragedy that I’ve warmed up to a bit more this time around. It’s a reminder that I still need to watch more early Jack Nicholson movies – I still only saw the first half of The Last Detail in college. Also it’s just nice to see Washington (or, let’s be real, more likely Vancouver, B.C.) in 4K on this new Criterion release. Unfortunately for me, the case my copy came in was cracked so this one will be going back to Barnes & Noble. But if anyone wants to do some early birthday shopping for me…