Class is not an unusual subject in American cinema, even if it too often revolves around nostalgia for the old neighbourhood or clichéd tales of social mobility, but Five Easy Pieces is unusual in its class antagonism. This is a film with little love and a lot of hate. For all that the characters are unsympathetic, they are also very human and finely drawn, largely because of the screenplay by Carole Eastman (under the pseudonym Adrien Joyce) and the excellent lead performances.
In the person of Jack Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea, a former upper-class child prodigy (the title refers to piano exercises) who has rejected his family in Washington state for life as a blue-collar oil field worker in California, this antagonism goes well beyond snobbery (or inverted snobbery) to touch on the sort of existential themes more familiar from European arthouse cinema.
Bobby is unable to rebuild relations with his estranged family but equally incapable of forging a meaningful life with Rayette (Black), the waitress girlfriend whom he both desires and despises. Ultimately, he both fears himself and hates what he has become.
The angry not-so-young man proved a career-defining role for Nicholson, and a character that he would revisit in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975), where a journalist decides to desert his life for another identity, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), in which he heads to a place that is “very cold” and clearly the end of the road.
“Five Easy Pieces is considered to be the quintessential film of the beginning of the seventies. This thoughtful character study offers a thorough portrayal of the alienation and restlessness of the American middle classes, rocked into instability by the shifting, unpredictable political situation and leaders like Nixon who proved to be everything but trustworthy.” Sven Mikulec – Cinephilia & Beyond.
“When we sense the boy, tormented and insecure, trapped inside the adult man, “Five Easy Pieces” becomes a masterpiece of heartbreaking intensity.” Roger Ebert (1970).
