Karen Black – Movie Musings

Nicholson gives a scintillating performance as a self-loathing soul in this searing drama

Director: Bob Rafelson

Cast: Jack Nicholson (Robert Eroica Dupea), Karen Black (Rayette Dipesto), Susan Anspach (Catherine Van Oost), Lois Smith (Partita Dupea), Ralph Waite (Carl Fidelio Dupea), Billy “Green” Bush (Elton), Irene Dailey (Samia Glavia), Toni Basil (Terry Grouse), Helena Kallianiotes (Palm Apodaca), William Challee (Nicholas Dupea), John Ryan (Spicer)

Robert Dupea (Jack Nicholson) is a man out of place. From a family of musical prodigies, groomed from childhood to become a leading concert pianist, he now works as an oil rigger out West. Turns out Robert isn’t content anywhere: he’s too rebellious for the upper-classes, too contemptuous to be part of the working classes. His life is one of running away, moving from place-to-place, avoiding emotional responsibilities, commitment and honesty, constantly seething with feelings he lacks the ability to process, unable to know what he wants with a self-destructive chasm a mile wide that swallows anyone that gets near it.

Five Easy Pieces is an intelligent, quiet, thoughtful character-study of a man who defies all possible labels and doesn’t fit comfortably into any pigeon-holes. Heavily influenced by the European artistes of the 60s, it’s a film that engages with class alienation in America more than almost any other, placing at its heart a man who refuses to compromise with anyone (to his own detriment) and whose selfishness and willingness to hurt other people constantly challenges the level of sympathy we are willing to give him. Despite this though, Rafelson has created a quiet domestic tragedy, with a man at its heart who is both unbearably selfish and unendingly vulnerable and scared at the world, who only knows how to react with bursts of resentful anger and whose instinct is to run away when things get either too tough or too involved.

Five Easy Pieces splits into three acts: the first sees Robert quietly snobbily bucking up against the working-class environment he’s chosen to live in; the second the long car journey to his family home while he struggles to find outlets for his tension; the third his return to the upper-class environs of his family where he can’t hide his contempt for their closeted privilege. What’s consistent is Robert is as constantly ashamed of himself as he is of his environs: a man of class and culture who longs to be working joe, a manual worker who yearns for sophistication around him. Robert’s tragedy is he can never square this circle.

It’s a role that calls for an actor at the top of his game, which it gets with Jack Nicholson. There is a moment near the start, where Nicholson does a little half-pivot skip while going round a corner into this home. It’s a small moment, but it’s a flash of something playfully real and endearingly childish that explains why we bear with him, even while he’s blowing things up around him. Nicholson’s performance is extraordinary. Robert has a constant simmering tension to him, but it’s a born of deep personal discontent. Nicholson perfectly brings to life a man constantly trying to seem assured, carefree and cool – but always with a nervous fear of what people think of him. Do the workers, and his friend Elton, realise he’s as posh as he is? Will his family look down on his waitress girlfriend?

One of the things Nicholson brings so brilliantly to Robert is his unease with talking: sure, he can barnstorm a self-righteous speech, but when it comes to actual conversation or talk about personal emotions he’s as timid and lost as a child. The idea of having roots is anathema to him (he’s perfectly willing to abandon Rayette when he thinks she’s pregnant) but it’s clear he also wants to belong somewhere. His tragedy is, as soon as he finds himself part a community all he feels is contempt for them – as if, like Groucho Marx, he can’t imagine joining a club that would have him as a member.

In fact, it becomes clear, Robert probably hates himself. He dismisses his accomplishments: inveigled into playing piano by his brother’s fiancée Catherine (a lovely performance of misguided sensitivity by Susan Anspach) he responds to her emotional reaction with dismissive rage, belittling his playing and questioning her feelings. It’s a mark, again, of the vulnerability and sensitivity Nicholson balances in this tempestuous, angry man that after this takedown we still believe she goes to bed with him. The tension of Robert’s loathing of himself never needs much to be released in anger against strangers: be it ranting at cars pointlessly blaring horns in traffic jams or an argument with a waitress who refuses to bring him toast that ends with glasses thrown petulantly across the floor. Nicholson never lets the pain of dealing with the world escape from Robert’s eyes, even when he’s at his most abrasive.

Robert’s inability to place himself in either world is perfectly captured in his relationship with waitress and would-be country singer Rayette, played with an endearing honesty and affection by Karen Black. If Robert could compromise, they would be well-suited: they both love music and share a sense of rootlessness. But he makes no real room for her. He can’t hide her contempt for her liking the wrong sort of music (country is no Chopin), he fills their house with little touches of art and scoffs at her inability to appreciate them; then he defends her working-class-honesty against his family’s snobbish friends while also being mortified by her artless, uneducated conversation among his family.

Fundamentally, Robert only cares for Rayette in relation to how she makes him feel about himself in the moment. She is a safe, undemanding comfort blanket – someone who will accept anything from him. His first instinct before returning to his family is to ditch her. Nicholson (in a superb sequence) shamefacedly mutters apologies between angry self-justifications while packing his bags – before a burst of self-loathing in his car sees him return. He then drags her across country only to park her at a motel while he sees ‘how things are’, clearly hoping she may decide to head home without him. When she instead turns up, he’s as ashamed of her as he as of his family’s wealth.

Like his siblings, Robert has never really grown up. His kindly sister Tita (a beautiful performance by Lois Smith) bounces around with enthusiasm, twiddles with a ping-pong bat with teenage glee while she flirts with her father’s nurse and seems utterly cossetted from the outside world. His brother Carl (Ralph Waite, very funny) has the distracted air of a natural eccentric, who has never had to engage with reality. But are they that different from Robert, who has a childish tantrum when he loses a bowling match? Five Easy Pieces suggests a difficult, distant relationship with his domineering father (now confined to silence in a wheelchair) in an astonishingly raw scene from Nicholson – but goes far from giving Robert a pass, his self-destructive self-loathing being far more of an inbuilt character flaw.

In fact, Robert suffers from an ennui that suggests he will never be happy wherever he lands – and he lacks either the self-knowledge or willingness to change. Above all, and it’s clear in every frame of Nicholson’s searing performance, Robert is a man who despises some part of himself so much, that all he can feel for those who show him warmth is contempt. After all, if he doesn’t care for him, why would anyone do so? It’s a pattern that is destined to leave him forever unhappy, forever hurting people, for ever lashing out. It’s a brutal honesty that makes Five Easy Pieces in some ways one of the bleakest, least hopeful of American films.

Robert Altman’s sprawling classic takes on a whole city in the brilliant Nashville

Director: Robert Altman

Cast: David Arkin (Norman), Barbara Baxley (Lady Pearl), Ned Beatty (Del Reese), Karen Black (Connie White), Ronee Blakley (Barbara Jean), Timothy Brown (Tommy Brown), Keith Carradine (Tom Frank), Geraldine Chaplin (Opal), Robert Du Qui (Wade Cooley), Shelley Duvall (Martha), Allen Garfield (Barnett), Henry Gibson (Haven Hamilton), Scott Glenn (Pfc Kelly), Jeff Goldblum (Tricycle Man), Barbara Harris (Winifred), David Hayward (Kenny), Michael Murphy (John Triplette), Allan F. Nicholls (Bill), Dave Peel (Bud Hamilton), Cristina Raines (Mary), Bert Remsen (Star), Lily Tomlin (Linnea Reese), Gwen Welles (Sueleen Gay), Keenan Wynn (Mr Green)

Robert Altman’s magnum opus, Nashville has the city has its set and, seemingly, its entire population as the cast. Over the course of a few days, Nashville charts the interweaving lives of a host of people making (or trying to make) a living in the home of country and western and the hangers on and fans flocking around the edges. Meanwhile a presidential campaign plays out, trying to recruit stars as fund-raisers.

You could say that, on the surface, Nashville isn’t really about anything. Certainly, it’s plot (such as it is) is more based on observing our characters interacting with and responding to events. Wonderfully rich short stories overlap each other, the focus mothing smoothly from one and another. It’s not really grounded in an overarching plot, such as McCabe and Mrs Miller or The Long Goodbye. In many ways its more similar to M*A*S*H, an experience piece trying to capture the thoughts and emotions of a particular moment of time. It’s that which I think is the heart of it. Nashville is about very little, but really it’s about everything – and it’s one of the most enlightening and vital studies of twentieth century America you are ever going to see. A rich and fascinating insight into a particular point in history, in a country rife with tensions.

You can’t escape that Nashville takes place in an America under the shadow of traumatic events. The 1970s (and the legacy of the 1960s) has pulled America further apart than ever. It’s a country struggling with a wave of assassinations, still deeply scared by the sacrifice of JFK (several characters, most notably Barbara Bexley’s permanently intoxicated Lady Pearl, reflect on the loss of innocence that came with it). Scott Glenn’s uniform clad army private is only the most visual reminder that the country is being ripped apart by Vietnam. Bubbling racial tensions are captured by short-order cook Wade (a lovely performance by Robert Du Qui) who angrily denounces black country singer Tommy Brown (a suave Timothy Brown) as an Uncle Tom.

Politically, America isn’t heading anywhere. The film is continuously framed by a car literally driving around in circles, blaring out meaningless platitudes straight from the lips of Hal Phillip Walker a third-party Presidential candidate who is against a lot of stuff (lawyers in congress and the Election College) but doesn’t seem to be ‘for’ anything. His smooth advance man John Triplette (Michael Murphy, quietly unimpressed by the music stars around him) drums up musicians to appear at a benefit – not one of whom even ask about the politics of the man they are being asked to endorse. Nashville isn’t a film that feels particularly enamoured either with politics or the level of our engagement with it.

Instead there is a new religion in town: fame. The musicians of Nashville at the time were unhappy with the film, feeling that Altman planned an attack on their industry. Altman is, of course, smarter than this. Of course, there are some satirical blows landed – but the film has respect and admiration for artists with genuine talent. Its real criticism is for fakes and poseurs (of which more later). But for the talents at the centre, sure they are flawed – but there is a respect for their skills and genuineness that keeps the film relatable. (Altman would be far more vicious when he turned his eyes to Hollywood with The Player).

The artists at its heart are flawed but human. Haven Hamilton (a grandiose Henry Gibson) may be a blow-hard reactionary, but his patriotic pride and sense of personal responsibility is genuine (late in the film he will ignore a serious injury to show concern for others). At the film’s centre is fragile super-star Barbara Jean (a delicate Ronee Blakely), the beloved super-star teetering on the edge of a dangerous breakdown, overwhelmed with the pressures of fame and expectation. A lonely person, reduced to trying to communicate her unease to her audiences in rambling monologues. Looking for a human connection she’s unable to make elsewhere (this makes for a neat contrast with her rival, Karen Black’s bubbly but coolly distant Connie White who knows where to draw the line between public and private).

This humanity also makes for intriguing personal dilemmas. Singing trio Tom (a swaggering Keith Carradine), Bill (a frustrated Allan F Nicholls) and Mary (a saddened Cristina Raines) are in the middle of a love triangle (caused by Mary’s love for Tom, who loves the attention but doesn’t return the favour). Made more tense by Tom’s desire to go solo, the couple’s tensions are never firmly resolved – part of Altman’s avoiding of neat endings. Tom himself, in many ways a shallow lothario, is also shown to be feeling the same loneliness and emptiness as others.

It’s interesting that the film’s warmest character, Lily Tomlin’s Linnea, lies half-way between the world of the music and the world of normal life. A dedicated performer of gospel with an all-Black choir, Linnea also works tirelessly at home to support her two deaf children (who attract very little interest from their father, would-be fixer Ned Beatty). Linnea though is never portrayed as someone trapped in her life, in the way others are, but in complete acceptance – and even contentment – with her lot. Similar to Keenan Wynn’s grieving husband, desperate for his niece to engage with her aunt’s illness, the film’s real warmth is for those people grounded in real-life worries.

The film’s real fire is saved for the shallow wannabes that flock around the edges. The music stars may be flawed but they have talent (as witnessed by the film showcasing almost an hour of musical performance in its runtime – all the songs written and performed by the stars). Shelley Duvall’s would-be groupee is hilariously empty-headed and selfish. Ned Beatty’s greasy-pole climbing political animal is ridiculously pompous. At the top of the pile is Geraldine Chaplin’s reporter, an empty headed fame obsessive, hilariously fawning to the rich and famous and abrupt and rude to ‘the staff’, pontificating emptily in a car junkyard. Is she even a real reporter or just a fantasist?

Altman’s film also finds time for two very different women trying to find fame in this heartland of country and western. Sueleen Gray (Gwen Welles) is a waitress carefully cultivating all the patter of a star, but lacking the key attribute – talent. So desperate is she to ‘make it’ that she is willing to be exploited for a big chance, with only Wade having the decency to tell her she should cut her losses (advice she bats away in anger). By contrast, Barbara Harris’ Albuquerque, running from her husband to find fame, has the talent but never gets the opportunities – until of course at the very end (and it’s the result of the tragic fate of another woman whose doomed fate hangs over the film).

Nashville is a rich character study, but all these characters link back into an America at a turning point in its cultural history. Detached and disillusioned with politics, this is a country that is starting to see fame – and the indulgence of your own passions and desires – as the new religion. A religion that attracts both wannabes and also stalkers and dangerous obsessives (at least two of whom populate the film, one with fatal consequences). In this world, as idealism dies and is replaced by cynicism, people start to check out and either engage more with their own problems or yearn to change their lives and become something else. Altman’s film captures this moment in time personally, as well as being a compelling melting pot of stories. A rich, multi-layered tapestry – of which a review can only scratch the surface – it’s a great film.