Supergypsy

By Stefan Kanter

Jack Nicholson is either a mountebank or a highly gifted actor. Possibly he is both. As the dead-eyed hero of a couple of obscure westerns that he produced himself (The Shooting and Ride the Whirlwind), he made Clint Eastwood look like Laurence Olivier. In Easy Rider, he walked on and won the film from Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. Then he descended to his former persona in On a Clear Day, playing either Barbra Streisand's lover or a codfish. It was difficult to tell which.

Now, in Five Easy Pieces, Nicholson has retaken the high ground. He is Robert, an oil rigger, beering and wenching with the worst of them. One morning, caught in a traffic jam, Robert explodes. He clambers aboard a moving van, uncovers an old upright and begins playing a delicate Chopin fantasy.

Chopin? This is no ordinary roustabout, no average hardhat. This is a supergypsy, Robert Eroica Dupea, scion of a musical family, gifted pianist and older brother of the easy riders of 1969. Indeed, the same studio that produced Easy Rider has manufactured an undrugged, mature version of that film, complete with central emblem: the road as panacea. But now, if something in the plot has thickened, something in the pulse has slowed.

Improper Fingering. Robert has taken a series of pickup jobs, losing himself in the lives of common laborers. He has even impregnated a short-order waitress named Rayette, shrewdly played by Karen Black. The yammering redhead is like an anonymous grain of sand that becomes a major irritation in the viewer's eye. She and circumstance are enough to drive Robert to the family home on an island in Puget Sound. There he views the wreckage of three lives. His autocratic father is paralyzed by strokes; his brother is a priggish martinet; his rabbity sister Tita (Lois Smith), an accomplished recital pianist, still looks as if someone is about to rap her knuckles for improper fingering.

Therein lie the liabilities and virtues of this rich, contradictory work. Smith, a resourceful performer, has to work solely with her face; she does not get much aid from the script. Nor does Nicholson. Is Robert running away from excellence, or from the fear of failure? In one long pan, Producer-Director Bob Rafelson tries to supply an answer. Robert plays a Chopin prelude in an attempt to seduce his brother's protegee (Susan Anspach). Up moves the camera to a wall of pictures. There are the young siblings, smiling, optimistic, untouched. On an adjacent wall, the children are grown, the faces strained and damned, the father satanically peering from behind a flowing beard, all silk and grosgrain. That interlude is album riffling, not film making. Such short cuts summon memories less of Robert's early years than of Cornel Wilde's, when he played Freddie Chopin in A Song to Remember.

Unequal Time. Amongst mannerisms and quirks, Nicholson rides uneasily. As he plays him, Robert is a hollow man who can grab but not touch; in his joyless sex scenes and sudden tantrums, the failed prodigy is pathetically credible. But his attempts at humor make him look a bit like a third Smothers brother, and Nicholson's now familiar laconic manner and smile often appear to be a handy substitute for acting.

The film's least reliable contribution comes from Rafelson, a creator of TV's Monkees. When he is working with Robert's family, he shows a thorough understanding of the tragedy that resides in love. But he is capable of making the hardhats a mere composite of beer and bowling balls. As if to give the other side unequal time, he grossly carves his intellectuals out of ice.

One interlude, however, is entirely free of stylistic ties. On the road, Robert and Rayette pick up two dykey hitchhikers. One is sullen. The other (Helena Kallianiotes) delivers a ten-minute broadside at "man." She hates to disclose her destination (Alaska) because "man" will go up there and make it filthy. Like Nicholson in Easy Rider, Kallianiotes knows how to establish a character swiftly and how to make a running gag gallop. When she is on, the picture is wholly hers. Perhaps it is a characteristic of the new "road" pictures. In which case, the star should have known his fate. After all, he did it first.

. Stefan Kanter

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