Unlike the restlessness in a film like Easy Rider, which looks dangerous and cool and a lot like freedom, Five Easy Pieces is about the terrible uncertainty of being unmoored from any kind of satisfying life. When we sense the boy, tormented and insecure, trapped inside the adult man, Five Easy Pieces becomes a masterpiece of heartbreaking intensity.
The film, one of the best American films, is about the distance between that boy, practicing to become a concert pianist, and the need he feels twenty years later to disguise himself as an oil-field rigger. The title of Five Easy Pieces refers not to the women its hero makes along the road, for there are only three, but to a book of piano exercises he owned as a child. Nicholson was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his work here, and has rarely revealed such vulnerability since, though to be sure he became one of the iconic stars of the time ( Chinatown and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest also feature in our Ragged Glory: Summer in the 70s series.)Īlthough it begins in the oil fields of Bakersfield, California, much of the film was shot on Vancouver Island, in Mill Bay, Chemainus, and Saanich. Perhaps that’s why he remains such a memorable character.
A subtle character study written by Carole Eastman, Five Easy Pieces doesn’t glamorise Dupea’s disaffection – nor does it cure it.
Independent production company BBS reaped the profits from Easy Rider, and Bob Rafelson, a founder member of the company, cast Jack Nicholson as Robert Eroica Dupea – a middle-class drop-out who has turned his back on the piano career which was his birth right, and now lives the life of blue collar drifter.
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