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Five Easy PiecesRating:
Release Date: 28 August, 2001 Retail Price: $14.94 OUR Price: $10.99 You SAVE: $3.95! Cast: Complete Cast (7 total) |
Five Easy Pieces Reviews
as sad and hopeless as you could get
the whole life was just a meaningless struggle and very difficult to interpretate it. a quite good movie but also a very sad and hopeless one. a very represenatative piece of the 'existentialism' and 'escapeism' so popular in the 60s to 70s'. then fully bloomed into the crazy era of the vietnam war. these kinda movies would affect your mood badly, drive you nuts and throw you into a dark alley. there's no way a man could run away from himself.
Good up to a Point
Lois Smith is simply amazing as Tita (short for "Partita") Dupea, a classical pianist with a ne'er do well brother, Bobby (Jack Nicholson, never better), whom she pleads to come back home for a visit. Their dad, whom we imagine was once a powerful powerhouse of a man, has been reduced by illness to a mere shell of his former self. Still a big man, with a white Hemingway beard that gives him the look of an aged Sterling Hayden, old man Dupea still rules the roost in the sprawling yellow mansion his children still call home. Tita has all but abandoned her once promising recording career, to take care of her ailing father. She dresses like a frump, or sometimes like a little girl, with a red cardigan and pigtails. Smith is haunting when we first glimpse her laying down some piano pieces for an unappreciative and totally bored recording engineer. We see her as an artist first, but as an artist who seems to be losing it, for as she plays her piece, she starts humming along, apparently oblivious to the fact that the mike is going to be picking up these discordant, and increasingly loud, hums, she sounds like Winnie the Pooh. She is ruthlessly patronized by the engineering staff, so you feel anger on her behalf at the same time as you are hoping that she will do something for herself, for who would accord respect to one with so little respect for herself. Her joy at seeing her brother after a passage of three years is palpable. Usually Lois Smith is all ham, a mile wide. In everything from EAST OF EDEN to FOXES to AI: ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE, directors have tried tweaking that overbearing and particularly gruesome hamminess to ill effect, but here director Bob Rafelson (never better) manages to tone her down so she gives what must be her very best performance. When she grows sexually and emotionally attracted to her father's (male) nurse, a man with nothing to redeem him except a big wrestler's body, we watch her voyage from child to woman with a mixture of shock and total identification.
If only the rest of the movie was as consistently good as the scenes in which Lois Smith gives such a good performance. I found Susan Anspach's performance to be spectacularly awful. Her hair! Her overbite! That weird little voice, like the sound of a small mouse moving quietly through a cutlery drawer! Her outfits! Her passion for Ralph Waite AND for Jack Nicholson, two brothers of very different stripes. I remember how, years after FIVE EASY PIECES became a museumn piece, Anspach revealed that she had enjoyed an affair with Nicholson during the shooting of the film, an affair that resulted in a pregnancy and the birth of a baby, which she kept secret from the world press for decades. Good for her, but oh my, is she lousy here and what a shame, because the whole movie revolves around the possibility that Bobby, Nicholson's character here, might actually find true love, and when we watch his heart being broken we just scratch our heads and go, what's all this meshugina about Susan Anspach? It would be like falling in love with a palomino.
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