No matter how respected or prolific a thespian may be, the glow of Oscar gold isn't guaranteed. Just ask Lois Smith, a titan of the contemporary American stage with nearly 150 screen credits to her name. The closest she ever came to the Academy's good graces was at the start of the 70s and the New Hollywood craze, when playing Jack Nicholson's pianist sister in Five Easy Pieces. Bob Rafelson's film is something of a classic for those interested in this era of American cinema, but its legend tends to circle around the leading man and, maybe, Karen Black. Still, Smith delivers a performance worth considering and, as the title of this post suggests, she was almost there…
Tracking the story of one Bobby Dupea, director Bob Rafelson and screenwriter Adrien Joyce capture the ineffable mood of generational change. Five Easy Pieces isn't merely the portrait of an upper-class dropout playing at poverty before the siren call of his past brings him back into the privileged fold. Or, at least, it transcended that not long after its release, for its place in film history is much bigger than the modest narrative to which it dedicates 98 minutes. In retrospect, the movie is symbol and prelude, it's the precognition of a new way of making cinema that would take over the American industry and shape our cultural understanding of the 1970s.
Watching it in 2024, there's a sketch quality to the flick, the marks of a piece that functions within a model closer to the acting workshop and screenwriting lab than traditional drama. It's indelible in that regard, and even the places where it misses have their value. Every mistake, like its greatest features, works as a crystallization of bigger trends in motion pictures. Lois Smith said it perfectly when she talked about Five Easy Pieces encapsulating the restlessness of the era, "challenging institutions and systems and habits and manners and ideas and politics." On a larger scale, it does that while also understanding how hollow such rebellions could be.
Bobby, for example, is an empty thing, voracious in the way only a void can be as it devours those around him and spits out a gnarled ball of flesh, bone, sinew, and heart tendrils of what used to be a person. There's no pity, only lucidity. And such is the film's 'take no prisoners' frankness that you could presume its making was a tortuous affair. Not so for Smith. She has referred to the process as some of the happiest moments of her career and regarded Rafelson's approach as a gesture of unbending generosity. Rather than forcing emotion, dragging reality out of the artifice kicking and screaming, he'd guide his performers through active collaboration.
There was an emphasis on preparation, especially when it came to the Dupeas' musical prowess. Yet, the focus was always on getting the truth on celluloid, the reality of the characters' complex interiorities on screen for all to see. Clear and evident, but not so demonstrative as to break the implicit contract between audience and film. The character is the point, not the performer's effort. It should feel authentic and indeed it does, with the movie achieving a grace that wasn't always present in the many New Hollywood experiments it follows and previsions. Lois Smith's various scenes as Bobby's sister are emblematic of these modest triumphs, well-judged priorities, and the like.
Her Partita shows up 30 minutes into Five Easy Pieces, after Bobby gets his girlfriend pregnant, an oil field pal is arrested, and the supposed comforts of faux-blue collar humility start to wear thin. He's just quit his job and driven to Los Angeles when the story finally crosses paths with the man's sister, busy with a piano recording. Hunched in the strenuous labor of playing her variations, she hums along and cuts a comical figure. Partita somehow looks younger and older than Bobby. The shadow of prolonged adolescence looms over her posture, the scrunched-up concertation. But an adult's long-in-the-tooth weariness rings through the voice once the trance is broken.
A few acrid remarks from the control room invoke the inklings of a tantrum, but the commotion rings truer as ravings of a melancholy soul rather than a kid's self-involved wrath. And then she spots Bobby, reuniting with her sibling with a mixture of relief and trepidation, the pleasure of seeing a loved one again while acknowledging the pain of the man's prolonged absence. Smith 'writes' Partita with recurring ellipses, trailing into dead air, dead weight, and dead quiet in ways that suggest everything the text refuses to spell out. It's a fantastic example of a thespian deepening their material without highlighting the craftiness inherent to such tricks.
The encounter finishes on a dour note, the rhapsody of their fraternal love coming to a stop with news of a father's imminent death. Smith plays the affliction of the situation well enough. However, neither she nor Nicholson ever provide the viewer with the simple strong emotion you could expect. Grief can come at you fast. It can be sudden and clammy, a wet, salty mess as tears run into the mouth and sweat pools in the desperate warmth of an embrace that's never enough. But it can be colder, like here. It can be bone dry and slow-moving, an agonizing crawl. It can also see sorrow be denied, bottled up with a stopper of indifference on top. The Dupeas exemplify the latter.
As Rafelson and company work their way around the imminent loss of father Dupea, the prodigal son comes back and catharsis remains beyond the picture's reach. Not that the filmmakers are reaching toward it. On the contrary, they deny it outright, pulling the audience from whatever closure they could dig up in the pits of Five Easy Pieces. It's brutal business, sad yet pitiless, which doesn't mean the performances have to forefront cruelty. Smith never does. Her reintroduction happens as she's in service of the patriarch, cutting his hair like the perfect picture of filial devotion. Again, she's hunched, and again, her vague airs of sullenness break into a smile when Bobby comes into view.
At dinner, Smith does some of her best work, delineating the awkward workings of the family unit, the soft resentments and hardened affections shared between blood relatives and the odd intruder into the sanctum. One recognizes a certain stubbornness in welcoming the vagrant brother, while the bond with her other sibling is decidedly less convivial. The heart grows fonder with absence. In close proximity, it turns stale. It's nothing showy, no brash dislike in the style of some long-ignored, big screen predecessor to the Succession family circus. These ARE serious people... sort of.
Every break from that muted register hits like a freight train. Notice the gradations of amusement in Smith's smiles, the bitterness that can coexist with mirth, the pain sketched in the jagged lines of a performative grin for the brother's sake. As Partita, the actress never pulls the spotlight, finding comfort in the margins, artistry in how she walks on the sidelines, enriching the center while keeping her foot away from it. She's also a necessary shot of humor when Five Easy Pieces curdles into its final act. It manifests in the woman's clumsy attraction to her father's caretaker, the ugly little tics that come to the surface in Bobby's presence, some childish regression or the sickness of nostalgia.
Don't be fooled by appearances, though. Despite it all, Partita might still see through her brother's false dichotomies better than anyone else in the movie. In fact, she doesn't split her creation in the style of Nicholson's deliberate fallacies, going instead for a polysemic appeal. Consider the passage when Bobby's pregnant girlfriend shows up at the estate and another dinner takes place, even more awkward than the first. Through cringe and calamity, Smith keeps stealing glances at Karen Black's Rayette. Is she fascinated by the other woman? And if so, would it be a show of solidarity or snobbery? Taking what could be a feckless wallflower of a character, Smith finds space for both possibilities. Similarly, her sexual advances with the male nurse are a joke and grotesque, a source of sympathy and its contradiction—an impressive juggle all around.
For her performance, Lois Smith won the NSFC for Best Supporting Actress, was Karen Black's runner-up in the NYFCC vote, and a Laurel Award nominee. As for Five Easy Pieces, it got four Oscar nominations, including a citation for Karen Black. Sadly, only one of the movie's supporting women made it. Along with Black, AMPAS chose to honor Lee Grant in The Landlord, Helen Hayes in Airport, Sally Kellerman in MASH, and Maureen Stapleton in Airport. The Academy Award went to Hayes, marking her second victory, and you can read more about the race by checking the Supporting Actress Smackdown. Smith has yet to receive her first Oscar nomination, though she got some buzz for Marjorie Prime in 2017.
Five Easy Pieces is streaming on Amazon Prime Video and Showtime. You can rent and buy digitally it on Amazon, Apple TV, and the Microsoft Store. On the physical media side of things, the Criterion Collection has a beautiful edition of the 1970 classic.