Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces is a film that seems to arrive at itself only in reverse, concluding with a final image that leaves us thunderstruck, unwinding all that's come before in the new light of what we have learned.
No spoilers here. But suffice to say I have rarely seen a film so trusting of its audience to reverse-engineer the details of its story into a meaningful whole, without handholding, footnotes, or YouTube explainers.
Not that YouTube explainers, or even the false necessity of same, were around in 1970. Hot on the back of their industry-shattering success with Easy Rider, BBS Productions launched the American New Wave 70s with Five Easy Pieces, a doleful character study of a man who might be a lamented genius, might be a terminally self-destructive asshole, but is more likely both.
Jack Nicholson grabs hold of his career standing as one of the best to ever do it in his lead role as Bobby Dupea. We find him in Bakersfield, drilling oil with a sunny-minded reprobate best friend, making house with a Tammy Wynette-singing, pink-uniformed diner waitress (Karen Black as Rayette, Oscar-nominated for the role), and generally letting responsibility bounce off him like so many drained Modelos off the rim of the garbage can.
Bobby's in a deeply codependent relationship with Rayette, who both disintegrates at his abusive behaviour, and takes him back every time. He's cheating on her, when he's not getting into fistfights with cops or freaking out at his bestie for suggesting that following through on Rayette's surprise pregnancy might turn him into a more useful sort of a person.
And then, across a single cut, we find Bobby dressed in a clean suit, driving into Los Angeles to visit a recording studio, and we realize -- over half an hour into the picture -- that we don't know him at all.
We were given one clue. Mired in a traffic jam, Bobby jumped out of his car and onto the back of a lorry hauling scrap and garbage, and started hammering on the keys of a defunct piano, almost carving its stretched-out strings into tune. The lorry gets off the highway, out of the traffic jam -- an inspired moment of visual foreshadowing by director Rafelson -- leaving Bobby's car and his friend behind.
In Los Angeles, we start to get the other side of the story. Bobby's sister (Tia, in an incandescent turn by Lois Smith, all slumped shoulders and brimming eyes), also a piano player, tells him their father is dying. Bobby travels north to Washington, Rayette in tow (though he ditches her at the motel rather than suffer the ignominy of bringing a blue-collar girl home to daddy), and relocates himself among his original family.
The entire visual language of the film seems to shift, code-switching its class alongside Bobby, who has been condescending to the hardscrabble life but, we learn, is little better at pretending to belong to a well-to-do enclave of artists and musicians. Rafelson creates an almost unbearable domestic tension to generate a working psychology for Bobby in reverse, a cartoon cutout in the wall of his family home.
One sequence finds him playing Chopin for his brother's girlfriend. The camera drifts off Bobby to find a seemingly endless array of photographs on the wall opposite: family, childhood, forebears from ages past pass before us as Bobby finishes a solo that he then immediately describes as evoking no feeling in him whatsoever. He's been adept at this kind of performative emotionality since he was 8 years old, and I suspect he's telling the truth -- and revealing a kind of quiet desperation in himself -- when he says that locating the emotional experience that other people seem to find within these pieces of a life is always, cruelly, beyond him.
Criterion's 4K upgrade of Five Easy Pieces updates spine #546, which previously also appeared in the five-disc "America Lost and Found" boxed set of BBS Productions. Encoded in high dynamic range with Dolby Vision, the restoration beautifully captures cinematographer Lázló Kovács' durable photography, with inky blacks beyond a nighttime poker game, or misty pastels at the Dupea compound in forested Washington. Grain is fine and accurate, never overwhelming.
The 2-disc set packs the special features onto the Blu-ray copy of the film (the 4K disc has only the film, and the commentary track). The supplements aren't much. A scant 9-minute featurette from 2009 sees Rafelson (and Nicholson, but mostly Rafelson) reflecting on the work. Two additional pieces cover the legacy of BBS Productions more broadly and in greater length. There's also some archival audio material from the mid-70s at the American Film Institute in which Rafelson discusses his creative process.
The film is now available from The Criterion Collection in a 4K+Blu-ray two-disc edition, as well as separate Blu-ray and DVD editions.