Movies Five Easy Pieces at the Abbey II

IF YOU'VE seen Five Easy Pieces, then you can understand why its mammoth box-office figures in Variety each week seem something like a telegraphed, last-ditch mass suicide threat on the part of the movie-going public. For this film's enormous success clearly has little to do with its cinematic merits, which are not all that numerous, and everything to do with the morose message it manages to transmit. Five Easy Pieces is about emotionally handicapped people trying desperately to ward off terminal psychic disaster-and, accordingly, its phenomenal appeal seems very much a symptom of a national mood bordering on emotional collapse.

Adrien Joyce's screenplay does not have to cover much territory (in time or space) or involve many characters to bring its goods home. It tells the simple story of a moody redneck named Robert Dupea (Jack Nicholson), who works on an oil-rig by day and sleeps with Ray (Karen Black), a dumb-blonde diner waitress, by night.

Or so it seems. When Robert returns to his childhood Washington home after receiving news that his father is dying, we discover that he is actually the wayward son in a family of musical prodigies. The redneck is not a redneck after all, but an alienated misfit, unable to adjust to either the intensely intellectual world of his family or the mindless physical world of Middle America. Robert is that figure increasingly common to American films-a man without a country.

What makes Five Easy Pieces different from other recent American movies, though, is that Robert is detestable. He treats people, particularly women, like shit. He almost runs out on waitress Ray when she becomes pregnant, and, later, when she shows up at his father's home, he ignores her to the point of cruelty.

And yet, as extreme as Robert's emotional defects are, it is terribly easy to identify with him to enough of an extent to make the film work. Robert's defense mechanisms-and, for that matter, those of every other character in the film-are so credible that we cannot help but take them as the logical extensions of our own. Five Easy Pieces confirms our worst suspicions about ourselves and our country: America is a place where alienation is so widespread as to preclude any real human contact. True or not, this fear is at the heart of our apocalyptic visions-and the ease with which we believe that the world depicted by this film is already close at hand does not bode terribly well for the future.

Not that there isn't any hope in Five Easy Pieces. At one point, Robert, adrift in his father's house, expresses romantic interest in Katherine (Susan Anspach), his brother's fiance, who is also staying there. They play out all their little defensive games with each other, and, just as things seem at a standoff, Katherine asks Robert to sit down at the piano he had long ago abandoned and play her a piece.

As he plays, the camera pans from the piano to some violins lying on a table to old framed photographs of the family (Robert, his violinist brother, his tortured pianist sister, and his fiery eyed father) to somber portraits of 19th-century composers to Katherine's face. Her eyes seem about to tear. The piece is over. She does not move. She has been reached, and there is nothing she can say. It is a moment of passionate life-made all the more passionate by the aura of death that characterizes everything else in the film. But even so, the moment is brief; a minute later, Robert says, "So, I faked a little Chopin and you faked a little response." The walls are up again, and the characters go back to hitting their heads against them.

THE ELEMENTS that give force to that scene and some of the other, unpleasant scenes in the movie are the writing and acting, which, suddenly from time to time, strike right at that something we recognize as truth. If there is any actor who can be faulted, it is only Jack Nicholson, who uses his Easy Rider hillbilly accent and mannerisms in the early parts of the film-a characterization that makes little sense once you discover that Robert was raised in a cloistered homestead in the Pacific Northwest.

The direction, by Bob Rafelson, leans toward the mediocre. Rather than devising a consistent visual approach to the material (and surely there was one to be found), he tries a lot of things-some of which work, many of which do not. Much too often he falls back on photographer Laszlo Kovacs' repertoire of American scenic vistas to punctuate scenes-a device that seems intended, for whatever reasons, to invite comparisons with Easy Rider. Occasionally, Rafelson cuts to moments back and forth in time; this invites comparisons to another, thematically similar American film, Richard Lester's Petulia -comparisons which Five Easy Pieces courts to its own detriment.

There are also a number of disconcertin, sniggering (and sometimes sexist) jokes running throughout the film-such as a joyous intercourse scene in which Nicholson incongruously wears a T-shirt, only so that he can reveal the legend "Triumph" on its front once he has achieved orgasm.

It is, perhaps, difficult to forgive these irritating and sometimes tasteless lapses that dot Five Easy Pieces. But it is a testament to the parts of the film that work that they so overpower what is bad. The response this film gets is way out of proportion to the response it deserves; for better or worse, Five Easy Pieces is one of those lucky films that comes along at a time when it can profit largely because of the hyped-up sensibilities of the people who see it rather than those of the people who made it.