Bob Rafelson
Cinque Pezzi Facili (Five Easy Pieces)

Warning: the review reveals the plot and the ending.

In the middle of this film shot by Bob Rafelson in 1970 there is a scene that is emblematic: Jack Nicholson plays Bobby who, having returned home, tries to talk to the conservative father he fled from years earlier, who is now an apoplectic paralyzed mute. Well, the script called for Bobby to address his strict father tearfully for the first time in his life. But Nicholson didn't want to be seen sniffling in front of the rest of the crew, and Rafelson convinced him by promising they would shoot the scene on an isolated promontory: the camera operated automatically, and the director, facing the sea, held the microphone boom. Bobby, on his knees before the old man in the wheelchair, mumbled that they had never gotten along, and this time the tears came naturally because Nicholson himself had never known his real father. In his difficult childhood, he was made to believe that his grandfather, an old Irish drunkard, was his father, and Jack never got along with him.

But who is Bobby? For the first half-hour of the film, we know he is a worker at an oil field in California and lives with Rayette (Karen Black), a simple and naïve waitress at a fast food joint whom he treats with constant impatience because he is not in love with her. But Bobby is not just a simple worker, and we'll see the proof when, trapped in a traffic jam, he leaves the co-worker's car to climb up onto the back of a truck carrying a grand piano, and his improvisation of a Chopin fantasy leaves everyone speechless.

Robert "Eroica" Dupea is a misfit who abandoned his wealthy family of talented musicians and his world of conventions and conformity. But even the life of a worker with Rayette doesn't satisfy him: the mediocrity of his fiancée, the monotony of days filled with work, lunch breaks, more work, and evening television increase his dissatisfaction, as he rejects the comparison to a "failed Southerner" like his colleague. He continues to consider special his destiny, but at the same time, rejects what could make him special; in short, he is even more snobbish than his brothers who haven't shed their bourgeois values.

The chance to return to Washington state to see his ailing father gives him the opportunity to confront his environment again. He does it in the worst ways, arguing with a waitress to get a menu different from the restaurant's "rules," insulting the intellectual friends with snobbish attitudes hosted by the family, seducing the prude brother’s fiancée with a Chopin prelude performance. Catherine is an intelligent girl with whom he can finally communicate but extremely formal, who ultimately chooses not to go with him because she sees him as lacking self-respect: she judges him, while the simple Rayette accepts him, and thus Bobby realizes his complete failure.

When in the famous promontory scene he wants to clarify things with his father, he must once again deal with incommunicability, leaving him nothing to do but take the way back with Rayette. And here is a fantastic scene filmed by Rafelson: the stop at the Gulf gas station in the rain, Rayette heading to the bar, while Bobby looks in the bathroom mirror for the first time to see "inside" himself. He leaves his jacket and wallet and boards a lumber truck heading to Alaska, the same destination as a lesbian hitchhiker disgusted with the filth of modern America, to whom he had given a ride earlier. Without any identity or protection, his choice, more than a search for a new unspoiled beginning, appears like a need for self-destruction: when the trucker warns him that "up there it’s devilishly cold," Bobby just shrugs.

A mere $800,000 from the proceeds of "Easy Rider" allowed Bob Rafelson to make a pivotal film of the new Hollywood. The dissatisfaction of a generation disillusioned by the ideals of the "summer of love" and then forced to confront the rules of triumphant conformity leads to a situation of compromise or to a solution of annihilation. Almost forty years later, with Sean Penn's "Into the Wild," this topic is still relevant.