Review of Five Easy Pieces (1970) by Travis Y — 01 Mar 2008

Five Easy Pieces is much like its protagonist, Robert Eroica Dupea: buried beneath a disguise of superficiality lies brilliance, passion, and pain. Not only is Nicholson as Dupea at his personal best ever, his performance in this film is unparalleled in post-modern cinema.

We soon learn he works as a manual laborer in a hot, dusty oil field simply because he is so exceptional that he can do anything he wants, he can truly be anyone...except himself. The people with whom he surrounds himself cannot help being who they are, but they do the best they can with what they have. There is a humanity, an honesty in their simple lives that he admires but cannot find in himself. In a way it is honorable that he does not condescend, that with pleasure he dates a gum-smacking waitress from a diner and goes bowling with his pals. But he wants more, because he will never find what he is searching for in them, there is so more to him than just a rowdy two-timing roughneck. Frustrated, he erupts in fits of torment and rage that obliterate his mask of sanity. He cannot escape the life he left behind.

It is his past, his eccentric but gifted family that comes to bear when he returns to his childhood home on a small, eternally foggy island in Puget Sound. We see the real him emerge: the tortured musical genius, the sensitive loving son. We are moved, they are moved, but he is not. He will always see himself as a failure, he has lost all he ever wanted, and nothing else matters. His entire life has been one of self-denial, and as a final condemnation he rejects himself.

The closing scene will always be controversial because of its ambiguity. He looks in the mirror and fearing the past, present, and future dives even deeper into a life of anonymity. He has become no one.

Watching this masterpiece is witnessing the journey of not just any man but every man, to choose between finding or losing, accepting or rejecting, living or dying. By watching Robert Dupea, we can choose to do what he could not.