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Rating: I paid five one-euro coins for it. "Five Easy Pieces", essentially. It was among dozens of blockbusters and 80s action films at a stall: a rough diamond amidst a fountain of smoking dung. It only took seeing the name of my favorite actor, Jack Nicholson, and the movie’s release year to buy the DVD sight unseen.
Bobby is a brilliant and restless person, irascible and perpetually dissatisfied. His aimless wandering in the 60s United States isn’t about searching for something but rather embodies an escape from the bourgeois environment in which he grew up. Bobby represents a conflicted generation that doesn’t want to impose limits and seeks independence at any cost. The piano that he was forced to play like a parrot as a child now disgusts him because it reminds him of the time when he had to submit to the will of a strict father who gave him no choice.
Bobby chose to kick that easy life goodbye. A kick in the ass to his father to climb the social ladder backward and become a worker drilling oil wells. A gruff and difficult man who fights with everyone and roams the U.S.A. without roots or any form of ties. The movie begins with him living with a beautiful girl with a great pair of breasts and doe-like eyes who forgives him anything he does. A splendid girl who, in his exact words, “would be perfect if she didn't speak”. In short, without overtyping beyond necessity, he finds himself exactly on the opposite side of where he would have ended up had he stayed home. But the screenplay brings our Bobby back home because his father is gravely ill (senile dementia) and…
A splendid and sharp ending for a valuable film well-directed by Bob Rafelson, enhanced by excellent cinematography and a very well-developed, straightforward plot without any bullshit rhetoric or embellishments. A work I was shamefully unaware of, with Jack Nicholson and Karin Black elevating it with two top-tier performances and a couple of goosebump-inducing monologues.
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By supersoul
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.
Without any identity or protection, his choice, more than a search for a new unspoiled beginning, appears like a need for self-destruction.
