America Lost and Found: The BBS Story
Bobby Dupea is kind of an asshole, works on an oil field, and treats his not-too-bright girlfriend like shit. When his sister tells him that their father has fallen ill, he returns home for a final visit. Stars Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Billy Green Bush, and Lois Smith. Written by Adrien Joyce and Bob Rafelson, and directed by Rafelson. 1970.
Very sombre, plodding, disenchanted. Five Easy Pieces could be described as an unforgiving character study of an asshole. The film moves at a very staggered pace with plenty of memorable scenes, delivering short episodes of conflict before Bobby, and the film with him, simply moves away from these. It's not a movie that's about any one thing, except for I guess Bobby himself, and it doesn't really deliver a moral, a theme or idea that we're supposed to take away, and it becomes fitting the more the audience gets to know Bobby. The movie spends a lot of time building Bobby into a person we don't really like, and then shows us what made him into the man he is and can't help but sympathize. You can't call him a hero or a rebel, but a guy who's just trying to move away from the intolerable and finds nowhere else to go. Jack Nicholson brings his talent to bear here in one of his earliest lead roles, showing us a man who simply goes through the motions of everything, until it becomes too much trouble and he flees. The social dissatisfaction and desperation presented in the film seems aimed in particular at the western culture of the time, but it doesn't matter because it feels like nothing's changed.
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