|
Between "cracker assholes" and "pompous celibates," Heidegger's prodigal poet. He (Jack Nicholson) toils in oil rigs in California, bunks with a waitress (Karen Black), spends his nights with beer and bowling and floozies. The latest pit stop in a wandering life, up next is the return home in Puget Sound with girlfriend in tow. Needy sister (Lois Smith) and stiff-necked brother (Ralph Waite), plus the protégé who sees through him (Susan Anspach) and the paralyzed maestro who watches it all (William Challee). "A matter of musical integrity," Chopin and Tammy Wynette, that "inner feeling." "Maybe if you'd supply more, it might rub off on me." The New Hollywood situation, manic and moody, its antihero equally lost in desert and at sea. Grave naturalism is Bob Rafelson's stylistic key after the wise-guy surrealism of Head, a vast landscape of motels and diners and trailers for the runaway prodigy to bounce through. Wild Strawberries for the arguing hitchhikers by the side-turned car (Bergman returns the compliment in Autumn Sonata), setting up Helena Kallianiotes' vehement vaudeville turn as a fellow rambler with no taste for Man's filth. "Absolutely no objectionable idiosyncrasies." The new decade's search for identity, the contradictory urges that fuel Nicholson's brilliance in the blur of role and persona. The protagonist climbs onto a flatbed truck in the middle of a noisy traffic jam and plays the piano while the vehicle pulls away, suddenly there's Matthew Arnold's scholar-gypsy ("But 'mid their drink and clatter, he would fly"). Of hicks and snobs, a distinctly American melancholia, restless, jocular, unsettled, skeptical. (Minnelli's Some Came Running is a crucial forerunner.) The dilemma is crystallized in an empty truck-stop restroom, the escape toward the cold follows. "Auspicious beginnings, know what I mean?" The West Coast Chekhov is answered by the Manhattan Dostoevsky of Toback's Fingers. Cinematography by László Kovács. With Billy Green Bush, Toni Basil, Sally Struthers, John P. Ryan, Lorna Thayer, and Irene Dailey.
--- Fernando F. Croce |