1970, The Beginning of the End.

JACK NICHOLSON — FIVE EASY PIECES — 1970

It’s a simple situation that so many people know. It was tragic in 1970. It is pathetic in 2023.

A boy is born into a family of musicians. He is more or less forced to take the same road and enter a musical career. The Piano will be his instrument. But it never was his choice and if you can learn how to play an instrument properly, even if you do not like it, sooner or later you get bored, if not something worse.

He runs away from his family and gets odd jobs to survive. He gets a girlfriend because it is what you have to do. He lives, even on his escape, a life that is dictated by rules coming from “society as a whole.” In 1970 that was the norm and that led so many young people to drastic choices that often went along prostitution, crime, drugs, various diseases, and AIDS was not yet there but soon it will lead to a real carnage.

He is trapped by his family to come back because the father has had a stroke and is very bad: he cannot speak at all anymore. They live on an island. He leaves his girlfriend who has come along on the mainland and he takes the ferry. Soon She will cross and she will find the family very attractive. But the young man is bored to death and has no future with these musicians, even if they are his family. He escapes again, with his girlfriend following. That’s what love is, I guess.

But at the first gas station on the mainland, he will drop it all, car and girlfriend and he will thumb a lift from a truck driver going anywhere provided it is not here, there, or even over there where he would be trapped by brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, and who knows what other parents or relatives.

Jack Nicholson is quite good in the part but the film means nothing really since we do not see what this man can do on his own, cut off from his family dependence. It has no future because he has no future except living along with what comes to him or what he comes across without any planning or perspective.