Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Directed by Bob Rafelson
Robert Dupea spends his days doing various odd jobs, drinking and womanizing until an encounter with his sister makes him revisit his past.
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What critics compared Five Easy Pieces to
Zhao’s flair for the open road recalls Dennis Hopper’s “Easy Rider” (1969), while her magic-hour skies rival Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” (1978), offering Fern as a successor to Jack Nicholson in “Five Easy Pieces” (1970) and Harry Dean Stanton in “Paris, Texas” (1984), a masterpiece so profound that it’s hard to put into words.
The same applies to Jack Nicholson, as Bobby Dupea, at the bitter end of “Five Easy Pieces” (1970), abandoning his girlfriend at the gas pumps, beside the Red Rooster Café, and hitching a ride on a logging truck—no wallet, no plans, not even a jacket, although, as the trucker says, where they’re headed will be colder than hell.
Like Jack Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea in “Five Easy Pieces” (1970), she’s a loner and a leaver by nature, if not as cruel about it.
As a practically invasive character study, McDormand’s acting chops win out (following her somewhat random movement through life, like a modernized “Five Easy Pieces”); but as a complete picture, it’s largely lacking, even with a hint of a love story creeping up toward the finale.
It turns out that the film had less in common with “Grapes of Wrath” than it does with road movies like “Easy Rider” or “Five Easy Pieces”.
As “The Holdovers” morphs from miserablist odd-couple comedy to bittersweet road movie, it aims to remind you, sometimes with a hard nudge, of Hal Ashby classics like “Harold and Maude” and “The Last Detail”; an argument with a waitress automatically nods to Bob Rafelson's “Five Easy Pieces.”
The director Jean-Marc Vallée, previously best known to British audiences for the pallid, Julian Fellowes-scripted costume drama The Young Victoria (2009), brings a grittiness and morbid humour to the storytelling here that, early on, evokes memories of Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces.
There are very few films in this day and age that both harkens back to the tradition of “Five Easy Pieces” exploring characters with no real future or anything to look forward to, and searching for one, while exploring the incredulously distressing and often futile machinations in the artistic experience of an author.
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But Demolition plays like a failed iteration of a 1970s angry-misfit movie (think Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces), not like the real thing.
Think Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces or, hey, Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting.
Even the fact that the movie borrows heavily from Good Will Hunting, Five Easy Pieces, family tragedies, custody-battle courtroom dramas, other Fox Searchlight feel-good flicks and every third egghead-vs.-jus’…
Think Susan Anspach in “ Five Easy Pieces” or Katharine Ross in “The Graduate.”
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In the ‘60s, films like Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces suggested that the road and the journey from point A to point B could be far more rewarding than any answer at the end of the trail.
It has more links with films like Five Easy Pieces and Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy, than with the slick arcade games that are the box-office winners of the 1980s.