Quintessential Jack

by Scott Edwards

  Nicholson’s funeral speech for the Freeman character was a moving eulogy for a friend, as well as a tribute to a real person rather than toward another actor playing a part. That is acting. And that is the only reason to care about The Bucket List, despite its entry into the vernacular and into the lives of viewers who ponder their own mortality.

  * * *

  Mortality becomes its own mission, one which touches us all. A parent of a senselessly killed child suffers in his own mortality; a detective desperate to fulfill a personal pledge to the parent of a murdered little girl fights the mortality of the innocent against the enduring life of the evil; another cop transcends his own mortality by bringing meaning into his own life against a system with no borders between right and wrong; soldiers and representatives serve others in a small bid for greater humanity; while mutual mortality sparks a shared humanity for a last-act odd couple.

  Our mission must be humanity versus mortality, whether real cops or soldiers or billionaires or parents of lost children or parents of film book authors. Truth engenders that victory, every time, for actors or for characters.

  4

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  Pieces of Schmidt

  One long room separates two small men. Not small in stature, but in significance. At one end, the first is young and taut and straight-backed. At the other, the second is old enough for retirement and soft and slumped. The first is chiseled and angular in visage, with the furrowed brow of the thoughtful. The other is doughy both inside and outside of his head. Attentive and active eyes contrast with dead and soulless ones.

  Yet they are the same person, 30 years apart.

  Decades ago, Bobby Dupea effectively became Warren Schmidt and accomplish his goal of having no goals; assume the identity of someone without one; and live the life of the truly lifeless. Bobby Dupea escaped because it was easy. He severed all connection with his past, his family and his own abilities because it was easy. Like vamping on piano behind Vegas showgirls, he could fake his way through an empty career as an insurance actuary and an empty existence with a family that was barely one—because it was easy.

  Nicholson played Robert Eroica Dupea to perfection in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces. Just over 30 years later, Nicholson artfully embodies that same character’s deflated future in the form of Warren Schmidt in Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt.

  Dupea wanted to disappear (and he did) into Schmidt’s meaningless corporate existence where others tell you what to do, when to do it, and how it should be done, leaving out only the whys as irrelevant and immaterial.

  In Five Easy Pieces, Nicholson is most alive during the explosions that helped define this breakout role, while establishing the “Jacksplosions” that became so prevalent through the actor’s career. He explodes in the traffic jam “dogfight,” descending into an actual barking match with an equally frustrated German shepherd. He explodes in his own car upon the character’s realization that he has no choice but bring Rayette (Karen Black) with him to see his family, becoming a trapped, violent and wild animal, yelping and kicking, uncontrolled and drooling. He explodes when live-in therapist Spicer (frequent Nicholson player John P. Ryan) makes the moves on his sister Partita (Lois Smith). Most celebrated, he explodes when idiotic rules reduce the customer to powerless patsy in the famous chicken salad sandwich diner scene.

  About Schmidt features such explosions, but they are less about meaningful emotion and more about reflex and reaction. He explodes upon discovering the affair between his best friend Ray (Len Cariou) and his wife Helen (June Squibb), with Nicholson adopting the same body motion, stance and action in his violent fit as Orson Welles directed toward his wife’s character in Citizen Kane. Warren Schmidt wobbles as Charles Foster Kane wobbles. Schmidt lurches and staggers like Kane. And Schmidt robotically tosses and swipes away his wife’s stuff just as Kane does with his wife’s. The scene also is a nod to the “all this crap” slamming and sweeping of Catherine’s (Susan Anspach) perfumes and cosmetics, her narcissistic possessions, by Bobby in Five Easy Pieces.

  Schmidt also explodes (or breaks free) with his liberating, look-Ma-no-hands urinating on the floor, using the same technique and same flourish with which he marks his territory directly onto the shoes of James Spader in Wolf. When Nicholson looks in the gas station rest room mirror at the end of Five Easy Pieces, it’s a reminder of the self-examination by the Monkees in a movie studio rest room mirror from the Nicholson-Rafelson-scripted Head.

  Intriguingly, Karen Black’s copy of the script shows that Bobby was not directed to study himself. In fact, he was “avoiding looking at himself in the mirror” and later “once more not confronting himself in the mirror.”1 It appears to be another invention by the actor, with Nicholson choosing to look at himself and look within himself to make this ultimate decision to escape into anonymity.

  When Nicholson’s Dupea looks at himself, only his eyes move. He searches for something as he searches for himself—in the same way Nicholson’s Jack Torrance does in the mirror during The Shining. Dupea and Torrance find the same thing: nothing. Nicholson’s eyes are all that move as Bobby makes the decision to cease to exist. Bobby’s remnants of a soul empty into the mirror, only to emerge as the nothing known as Warren Schmidt.

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  In connecting Five Easy Pieces as prelude to About Schmidt, we see that escaping doesn’t necessarily mean to a better place, or even to any place at all. Bobby had already abandoned his talent, believing he wasn’t a good enough pianist. Warren completes the process, living a life totally devoid of music or any art. Bobby, for all intents and purposes, has left his family behind (with the exception of periodic connection with his sister Tita, played by Lois Smith). Warren negates family from within, merely existing beside a lifeless, loveless wife with no emotional or physical charm, while pathetically reaching out—no, grasping—to an unappealing, annoying ingrate of a daughter (Hope Davis, as Jeannie). Jeannie’s contemptuous rejection of her parent is something normal kids grow out of in high school or early college, while her self-absorption is wholly unjustified based on her status and merits.

  Bobby Dupea enters a logging truck at the conclusion of Five Easy Pieces, abandoning both Rayette and his identity. Cinema scholar Don Schiach believes Dupea “represents the American male in flight from commitment,” reinforcing Nicholson as the eternal alienated outsider who must escape, without realizing that what’s really necessary is to escape from himself.2 Bobby is again heading elsewhere, in motion or thinking about it, a psychological dilemma called “‘flight forward,’ a compulsion to escape the unbearable present.”3

  Rafelson’s two-shot of Nicholson beside the driver evokes the image of Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross in the back of the bus as they escape to uncertainty at the end of Mike Nichols’ The Graduate. We’re on the road to nowhere, indeed.

  Dupea’s future, on the other hand, is not uncertain because he gets exactly what he seeks: nothing. From a gas station in Washington State, he rides along to Alaska, then to who-knows-where before eventually settling on an anonymous life in clear sight in Omaha, Nebraska.

  One of Nicholson’s best films, Five Easy Pieces (1970), presents an antihero who wants to escape his upper-class roots. A highlight of the film is the interplay between Nicholson and Karen Black, pictured.

  The original Five Easy Pieces ending had Bobby drown after his car plunged off a bridge, with Rayette emerging to search in vain for Bobby and then reducing their relationship to one final “You son of a bitch.”4 Schiach called this ending existentialist, as Dupea “is stripped of almost everything by a deliberate act of will.” He sweeps his life’s connections—from family and lover to identity and possessions—just as he clears the diner table and Catherine’s bureau top of “crap.” He runs away from responsibilities and the burden of his unfulfilled “auspicious beginnings.” Schiach all but confirms the viability of disappearing in plain sight as Schmidt, noting that Bobby is “reinventing himself, not in a mood of joyful liberation,
but out of miserable desperation.”5

  Bobby’s life as Warren Schmidt does not even rise to the level of being empty. He works for a company that forgets about him as soon as he’s out the door on his last day. His wife’s most passionate acts were reserved for his own best friend and her liveliest moment was her death. His daughter is as worthless as she makes her father feel.

  Schmidt appears to have no interests. He is uninteresting and disinterested. His accomplishments number not just in the single digits, but the single numeral. Bobby Dupea has escaped … life itself. He sheds his background, his family, his abilities—but he keeps going until he also sheds personality, inquisitiveness, purpose and meaning. He is too successful in his quest to avoid life and feeling.

  Nicholson is as masterful inhabiting the mercurial, emptily lustful antihero Dupea as he is in sliding into the formless, mirthless poster boy for unquestioning conformity we come to know as Schmidt.

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  While Easy Rider was Jack’s big break, and a break that saved his moldering acting career, Five Easy Pieces established him as a solid acting lead. A movie star. The sensation around the former film’s success was important, as Nicholson became the proverbial “overnight success after years of struggle” and was nominated as Best Supporting Actor. But there have been plenty of those who never made the next step up and many more who never had the chance for as tasty a subsequent role.

  Five Easy Pieces was reportedly written expressly for Nicholson by friend Carole Eastman (under the name Adrien Joyce). To most moviegoers, he was an unknown apart from Easy Rider, and Five Easy Pieces would establish him as the Jack Nicholson with whom audiences soon grew familiar (at least mid-period Jack, that is). He was camera-savvy enough by this point to act with more nuance, expertly controlling his face, his forehead’s transverse lines, and the vertical wrinkles at the top of his nose and between his eyes produced by the corrugator supercilii muscle. Part actor, part physiologist.

  In the invaluable Robert Crane–Christopher Fryer interview collection Jack Nicholson: Face to Face (1975), Nicholson named this his top performance, adding, “I would say that philosophically, I’m most attuned to the character in Five Easy Pieces.”6

  What makes this portrayal so special, aside from the freshness of seeing someone with talent take opportunity and fully seize its possibilities, is Nicholson’s character energy. It’s an energetic play, grabbing the character completely and immersing himself into every aspect of his being. Nicholson plays the competitor (bowling and cards); the cad; the caring brother; the womanizer; the disaffected and the disillusioned; the compassionate; and the loner. Most of all, Bobby is solipsism, a wandering discontent who is wandering without getting anywhere in particular and who is only focused inward, yet without any particular interest. Rayette serves as a force to escape … that is, until she becomes the catalyst for the next escape. Though Karen Black “was in heaven when I made it,” the actress had to enter a hell to understand her character. Despite being the victim of Bobby’s cruelty and neglect, “[s]he’s open, she’s not critical, she’s had a lot of life force, and she’s not thinking.”7

  It’s a cerebral movie with a thoughtful portrayal, yet what’s most striking is the actor’s use of motion. Five Easy Pieces is an action movie, but rather than car chases and explosions, we see a character chasing himself away with full intensity and with the occasional Jacksplosion along the way.

  Here, Nicholson is an actor with no physical limits. He didn’t just settle for passionate sex with Sally Struthers, but fused with her while swinging violently into walls and knocking over lamps. Thirty years later, she gushed to me, “I did that naked scene with Jack!”8 To Crane and Fryer, she was less excited but more expansive, saying that she learned to avoid pushing a scene from working with Nicholson. “He underplays so beautifully, he’s so natural,” explained Struthers, “a lot of the way he moves around with his head, or his hands, or doesn’t always look at the person he’s talking to is kind of a Marlon Brando thing.” She called Nicholson’s awareness of his own natural approach “a kind of studied unstudiedness.”9

  He doesn’t just play cards, but turns it into a ballet of joy and flirtation, tossing in the same unusual hand-swept-across-the-neck motion he introduced in Easy Rider.

  He’s completely body-aware. Notice his use of hands and exaggerated movements at the oil rig in the scene when Bobby attacks Elton (Billy Green Bush) about getting him to work there. When Nicholson walks, he swings his arm wildly like any proud New Jerseyian would, yet adopts a whole different body language when visiting his sister in the recording studio—with hands in pockets, subdued speech and tamed expression. Nicholson’s Bobby conforms to what he imagines is expected: Bombastic and aggressive on the rig; domineering and callous with Rayette; irreverent and subversive with his family. Vulnerable and out-of-place in the strict studio environment, Nicholson uses small motions, restrained movements, dampened speech, muted expression. Contrast that with the falling and flailing expansive body motion as Dupea tells Elton off about “the good life,” baring teeth and spitting words in dismissive condescension over Elton’s moralizing and Rayette’s pregnancy trap.

  This particular Jacksplosion looks like an on-screen version of an Abandonment Exercise practiced by acting teacher Eric Morris as described in his guide No Acting, Please (Nicholson provided the foreword). This exercise helps an enormously tense actor “blast through your barriers” to release tension, so intensely that it requires the removal of jewelry, glasses or any other objects that could hurt the student. It requires a soft surface like a carpet and enough space to safely accommodate expansive action. Morris instructs his acting subjects to “hurl yourself into what might resemble having a physical ‘fit,’ kicking, flailing your body in every direction, screaming, howling and being as vocally abandoned as you are physically.” Having this sort of guided fit eliminates anxiety and allows an actor to get deeper in order to free reluctant emotions until physically spent.10

  A portion of a page from Karen Black’s original script for her role as Rayette in Five Easy Pieces.

  Karen Black noted Rayette’s pronunciations in her Five Easy Pieces script.

  Now, re-watching the scene as Bobby reconsiders about bringing Rayette on his trip against his deepest, inward drive to escape—and then violently reacts to his own decision—you are witnessing one of Nicholson’s acting exercises in practice, though he does so trapped inside a car too small to fulfill the instructor’s advice about doing so in a large, soft-surfaced space.

  Most significantly, there is no indication of any of this in the script saved by Karen Black. It goes straight from the direction that Bobby throws the suitcase on the back seat of his car, gets in, “immediately starts the motor, and puts both hands on the wheel”11—right to the next interior setting when he pulls the needle across Rayette’s record. The script reads that he “puts both hands on the wheel.” Then … nothing. No flailing, no kicking, no animalistic screams punctuated by randomly recognizable profanities. All invented by the actor himself, in a true moment as felt by his character, and nothing from the page itself.

  His character energy is boundless. Watch the iconic diner scene. Nicholson moves through Dupea’s journey from reasoning to patronizing to anti-authoritarian to violent punk. starts so calm, becoming clipped and demonstrative, next betraying the edge in his voice when he says “between your knees,” and then putting his glasses on to give license as he takes on the attitude and bearing of a biker character.

  * * *

  Nicholson’s performance in About Schmidt is smart and subdued, and notable for its acclaimed and surprising restraint, as if the actor was considered incapable of reeling it in when necessary. Shaded and deft, human and exposed, the work draws attention with finesse rather than clumsily commanding it.

  Nicholson called it a film about humanity and “human problems, human aspirations and human frailties.” Proud of his work and the film’s rejection of pandering to the movie
masses, he admitted, “If I wasn’t in it myself, I’d say it was quite beautiful.”12

  While Five Easy Pieces shows the process of becoming empty, with Bobby emptying his life and himself of all touches, connections, responsibility and meaning, Schmidt provides the result: a man completely drained. Picking up Bobby Dupea’s story, and reconnecting with the character, Schmidt watches and waits as the clock clicks to five p.m., and as his last bit of life shrivels away (because his wife’s dying doesn’t quite rise to that level of significance).

  Bobby Dupea may well have hidden in plain site as Warren Schmidt. In About Schmidt (2002), Nicholson “underplays” as he grows from a “nobody” into an average retiree.

  Nicholson lowers his acting blood pressure, plodding along as a stuffed figure of a person, not as much without any emotion as without any need for emotion. We first see him totally immobile and unblinking, intentionally and extremely dead.

  Here is an actor in command, so strong that he can be delicate and subtle. Jack’s mindful that in real life, people try to hide their pain and insecurity, so he acts (or underacts as many have characterized it) accordingly.

  This is seen at Warren Schmidt’s retirement dinner in the near-wincing look on his face upon the mention of a meaningful life and raising a great family, betraying its complete lack of accuracy. This subtle sickness harkened back to the whole of a life that was more deserving of a bittersweet reflection, as long as it left out the sweet.

  The range of emotions Nicholson displays during a phone call with Hope Davis (as his daughter) travels seamlessly from happiness to disappointment, from disgust about a lousy gift and a lousier son-in-law-to-be, all the way back to affection.