FIVE EASY PIECES (1970): Story of an Unhappy Man

Five Easy Pieces is a 98 minute movie directed by Bob Rafelson that was just one in a series of depressing films featuring Jack Nicholson back in the early 1970s.  It’s often described as a piece of brilliant filmmaking for movies of this genre.  It just happens to be a genre that fails to edify.

Nicholson plays Robert Eroica Dupea, a former classical pianist who decides to instead to take on a blue collar job in the oil fields.  Robert spends his time with his friend Elton (Billy Green Bush) and his girlfriend, Rayette Dipesto (Karen Black).  Any satisfaction he apparently hoped for by withdrawing from his musical career is sadly lacking.  He spends much of his life drinking and pursuing other women. 

His occasional attempts to be patient with Rayette, who we soon discover is pregnant, almost always lead to Robert losing his temper with her.  Rayette is not his intellectual equivalent, but this does not explain Robert’s rancor.  It seems more likely that her personality and disposition do not fit in nicely with Robert’s black moods.

Robert makes a trip from California where he is working as an oil worker to his home state of Washington to visit with his ailing father.  In fact his father has had a series of strokes and is uncommunicative.  Robert gets along with the rest of his family just about as well as he gets along with anyone else.  While himself off-put by the Rayette’s simplicity of manner, he is also off-put by his highly cultured family.  This does not prevent Robert from pursuing and, for a short time, participating in a sexual liaison with a woman named Catherine (Susan Anspach), who is engaged to Robert’s brother played by Ralph Waite.

The poor suffering Rayette does show up at Robert’s family home after having been abandoned at a motel for two weeks.  Robert for once even sticks up for her by defending her to a family friend.  Robert even unburdens himself to his father who may or may not have understood a word he said.  Still, after Robert leaves with Rayette, he abandons her at a gas station and hitches a ride on a logging truck that is going to Canada.

One understands why Robert would be put-off by pretension epitomized by much that his family represents.  One also understands why he wouldn’t be happy with the work of an oil rigger and the life that follows.  One just wishes there would be more.  We can’t say that Robert has even struggled because he makes no effort to improve his circumstances.  No doubt he has fallen short of what was expected of him and he remains a child until the very end. 

Nicholson is capable of bringing life to a script in a movie such as One Flew Over the Cuckoos’ Nest or The Last Detail.  In both of those films he was fighting for something worthwhile.  In Five Easy Pieces, on the other hand, we see Nicholson reprise the almost identical role he played a few years later in Carnal Knowledge.  And as in Carnal Knowledge, the most sympathetic and alive character in the entire movie is the one that is abused the most (Ann Margaret in Carnal Knowledge and Karen Black in this film).

This movie is all about how good an actor Nicholson is – it’s not about a complete film telling a compelling story.  The previews of this movie were probably convincing.  The diner scene or the playing of the piano on the back of a moving truck make it appear like we are about to watch a movie that makes a strong statement.  Viewing the entire film, however, is less than satisfying. 

June 30, 2014

 © Robert S. Miller 2014

CHINATOWN (1974): Personal and Political Corruption

Chinatown, directed by the notorious Roman Polanski, is not light viewing.  This 130 minute movie tells a devastating story about a woman living in the 1940s who is just one of many that is destroyed by the intrigues of her politically powerful father.  Such a matter comes to the attention of an investigator named Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), a sleuth with anything but a decent reputation.

Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) was married to a man named Hollis (Darrell Zwerling).  Hollis is a decent man who cares deeply for his wife and Evelyn’s daughter, Katherine.  Hollis is also an incorruptible chief engineer for the water department in the city of Los Angeles.  When Hollis turns up dead, the mortician gives his official version of the death as follows: “Only in L.A., can the Water Commissioner drown in the middle of a drought.”  First hired on to discover if Hollis is having an affair, Jake turns his attention to Evelyn’s father, Noah Cross (John Huston), to determine if he murdered Hollis.

Noah is no ordinary villain.  He essentially owns the city of Los Angeles and doesn’t know how much money he really has.  Noah isn’t satisfied with just having money, however.  As he tells Jake later in the film, “most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything.”  For Noah, this even includes sleeping with and impregnating his own daughter, Evelyn.

It is late in the movie when Evelyn utters the horrible truth to Jake that Katherine is both her sister and her daughter.  Evelyn’s life comes to an end in Chinatown where the police are corrupt and just do not care.  Evelyn’s in Chinatown in an attempt to escape Noah Cross and to protect Katherine from discovering who her father really is.

When this film first came out it was considered a modernized version of the Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett stories of the 1940s where virtually no one but a select few actually care about what the truth really is.  As a reincarnated Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe, Jake Gittes does not inspire us as someone who should carry on such a task.  Jake has made a career investigating infidelities for questionable clients and now is expected to protect people like Evelyn who he has come to care for.  

It a film with an already intricate plot, Chinatown satirizes an establishment who will readily bow down to someone as sadistic as Noah Cross.  Anyone like Hollis or Evelyn who dares protest such a farce ends up being dead.  The film’s conclusion that such a power inevitably prevails over justice is in almost every respect a somber and hopeless one.

Unfortunately, the storyline is magnificently convincing and few in Hollywood have ever had the skills let alone integrity to make a more positive film any better.

May 31, 2014

© Robert S. Miller 2014

NEBRASKA (2013): A Gracefully Aging Bruce Dern

Nebraska is one of those films that are both moving and effective satire.  This is rare in the movie industry.  Usually the satire in films doesn’t work because the films contain nothing we can identify with.  And usually we don’t see anything that is heartfelt because movies are populated with people we can’t possibly admire or care about.

Having said that, Nebraska owes the success it has had to the two characters that are played by Bruce Dern and June Squibb.    Dern plays Woody Grant, the troubled old man who decides to travel from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska to pick up the million dollars he is told that he has won in a sweepstakes.  Squibb plays his wife, Kate Grant, a foul mouthed elderly woman who has put up with her husband for many years.

From what we learn about Woody, he’s been a hard drinking auto mechanic in his youth who has not been too good at holding onto his money and has been a bit less than ideal husband and father.  However, he’s sometimes been too generous with a number of his relatives and friends including his former business partner, Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach).

Though his wife and sons attempt to tell him that there is no million dollars to be provided in Lincoln, Woody is determined to make the trip even if it means walking there.  Finally the youngest son, David (Will Forte), decides to take a few days off from his dead-end job and accompany Woody on the trip.  This makes Kate all the more furious.  After a few mishaps, Woody and David make their way to Lincoln by first taking a detour through Woody’s hometown – a fictional small town called Hawthorne, Nebraska.  Woody temporarily meets up with his relatives (most of whom lead empty lives) as Kate and the other son, Ross (Bob Odenkirk) come to join them.  Here we learn about Woody’s life in the military, the acquaintances he grew up with and even a past love named, Peg (Angela McEwan).  (As an aside, her small role is excellently acted and plays a surprisingly important part in telling Woody’s story - as she’s one of the few remaining Hawthorne residents who really cared for Woody as he was and is.) 

While many in the town celebrate Woody’s supposed success in winning a million dollars, the primary motivation for relatives and his former business partner is to get paid back money for some imagined debt.  They quickly scorn Woody when they discover that he really didn’t win.  Nevertheless, David and Woody do make it to Billings where Woody discovers the actual truth about the sweepstakes.  David, not wishing to leave the matter as it stood, finances a pickup for Woody so that he can take one last drive through Hawthorne and show that he was a success.

The film was 115 minutes and directed by Alexander Payne.  Payne directed About Schmidt, a film as equally moving as Nebraska, and Sideways, a pretentious film that typifies much of what we see from Hollywood.  Nebraska succeeds because of the acting of husband and wife, good storytelling (there’s a great deal of understatement in this film), both light and dark humor and because the black and white cinematography helps us visualize how devastating life can be for large numbers of people.  Woody’s relatives seem to have nothing better than to sit around and watch television or else watch the traffic drive by.  Woody has in many respects never been given a break.  He is desperate for the million dollars because he feels he otherwise has nothing more to leave for his sons.  Nebraska depicts Woody’s wife and sons growing through the process of the film.  In some manner we even see such growth from Woody – a character who is often unable to articulate his own feelings.

The film is not perfect.  While cynicism is minimal, it sometimes does drift in.  Also, I felt the movie would have been better off without the depiction of two derelict cousins who by some miracle are on home-release and not sitting in jail.  And though the characterizations of the two sons would be more than adequate in most films, they are vastly overshadowed in this movie by the father and mother characters.

Still, as humble as a $13 million budget can possibly be in any undertaking, Nebraska seems genuine and thoughtful.  Payne did not make this film to be self-congratulatory which is unsurprisingly why it was passed up for any Oscars.  Hollywood needs more movies like this one just as it has needed so many low-budget but quality movies in the past.

March 22, 2014

 

© Robert S. Miller 2014

AS SPARKS FLY UPWARD: My First Novel Published

On Feb. 16, 2014 I published my first novel entitled: As Sparks Fly Upward : Tale of Belief, Unbelief and Hypocrisy.  The novel is 270 pages long and consists of 77,473 words.  It is personal, sometimes funny, frequently irreverent and often sad.  The blurb on the back cover describes the novel as follows:

As Sparks Fly Upward is about a young man’s inability to come to terms with the death of his father.  Joe Duncan’s father was an alcoholic, and Joe is well on the ways of becoming one himself.  His hometown’s condemnation of what happened to his father along with the unwillingness to provide his father with a decent funeral turns Joe against that community.   He learns not to trust even those that do care for him.

Joe’s rejection of organized religion is tied to his distaste of the small-mindedness of a community that wouldn’t accept someone like Joe or Joe’s father into its circle. 

The novel can be purchased for $11.23 at the following website:

https://www.createspace.com/4597352

It can also be found on Kindle at a price of $9.99 at the following website:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P6JK6AY_


Let me comment quickly about the price as this was not randomly set.  The minimum price I was allowed to set by the publisher was $10.23.  I decided to then add a dollar on for my own royalties.  I don’t anticipate making a great deal of money because, other than this website and a short story published in Writer’s Note Magazine, I have no publishing history.  I published in this manner because of too many rejections by other publishing companies that apparently did not have enough time to review my work.  One such publisher mentioned this fact to me while at the same time assuring me that they took my submitted work seriously.  I just do not have time to wait in line to see this novel in print.

As Sparks Fly Upward is not for everyone.  I’m not saying this to be modest or because I’m a bad sales person.  I feel the novel can be extremely funny in parts and it also has an important point to make.  The novel is a critique concerning the self-satisfaction of the voices of moral authority in many communities.  However, the fictional character that narrates the book while being unique, talented and at times extremely generous is also an extremely flawed human being.  I need to make clear that the narrator’s character does not speak for me.  He is contrasted by the other main character in the book: a young woman of about the same age with a similar background who, despite their similarities, has not succumbed to the cynicism of the narrator.  Still, the problems that the narrator faces are not easily surmountable and so the novel ends on a somewhat unhappy note.

The theme of this book may be too ambitious – especially for a first novel.  By explanation, it’s not possible to resolve all problems in any work.  I hope to provide more positive characters in a series of short stories that I hope to publish this summer or early fall.

I originally was going to include in my novel a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche from the Will to Power.  Nietzsche stated: “The arrogance of man: when he sees no purpose, he denies that there can be one!” I decided against including it because too many individuals quote Nietzsche to begin with.  Also, I thought it was a bit incongruous that I would quote from such a renowned atheist when the quote said to me that there is so much more to this world than meets the eye.

 

For those that are still interested, I think you will enjoy the novel.  As Sparks Fly Upward was not hurried to meet any deadline (as were some of my movie reviews) and therefore it’s extremely readable.  It’s also not dull reading.  The cover photo on the novel also tells a story in itself.

I’m now looking forward to getting on with other writing projects.

Robert S. Miller

February 17, 2014

© Robert S. Miller 2014