Five Easy Pieces

If anyone wishes to see Jack Nicholson before he became Jack Nicholson, they should check out Five easy pieces.

This is the kind of film I wish more were made like. That's a clumsy sentence, isn't it...? Telling the "story" of a burnt out drifter, it is a curious film because it really tells you nothing nor does it pretend to. If anything, it is almost an inherently selfish film, and I can see why Nicholson was chosen to play the lead character.

Nicholson plays a once-upon-a-time classical piano player who in the beginning of the movie is working on an oil rig. As is usual with Nicholson characters, you get the impression that this is one smart guy. Unlike Nicholson characters, this one is not aware of it. Kind of like Bono before 1985. As the film advances, you're brought closer and closer to the character. The closer you go, the farther you want to be.

It's definitely one of the strangest movies I've seen, and there is nothing outwardly strange about it. As more of the interplay takes place between Nicholson and his girlfriend, the more I kept thinking "what in the world do the two see each other?". Perhaps that's the message of the field. Two people with nothing in common hanging on to each other.

Well, not quite. The woman is left at the end of the film in an underhanded manner - she wants to pull over at a diner, and Nicholson goes to the toilet and out of her life - but he gives her his wallet and leaves his car for her. It's this paradox - that a person can be so caring and so disinterested at the same time - that is puzzling and satisfying.

It's really difficult to describe the movie. At the end when our man attempts one last way to retribution it is doomed from the beginning itself, you want to slap yourself and say what the hells wrong with the guy, but you know within that this is more truthful than it is possible to admit.

Watch it!