Easy Rider

Easy Rider is a movie I don't really like. I think it has not aged well and am a bit surprised why it is considered so great. Easy Rider rejects authority and promotes living life the way you want as long as you don't hurt anyone. It seems quite impossible to promote this wonderful, exciting messages in an uncompelling way, but the movie very often pulls it off. Easy Rider promotes experimenting with drugs, but there hardly is a movie which can serve as a better argument against it. Dennis Hopper was mostly high when he wrote and directed the movie and the results are not always good. The dialogue is sometimes utterly silly and nonsensical. And even the famous trip scene, where a drug trip is shown, is completely uninspired. The biggest problem is in the performances by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. Especially with Hopper it's sometimes obvious that he is acting completely stoned. The result is that Hopper and Fonda in many scenes seem completely uninspired and uninterested, draining the energy out of scenes that could be potentially a lot more interesting. I haven't seen other movies by Fonda and Hopper from that period, but considering Easy Rider was a labor of love for them I dare not imagine how dull their performances were in other peoples movies. Especially Hopper would later in his career prove that he can do much better with movies like Blue Velvet, Hoosiers and Speed.

On top of all this, I think Easy Rider wasn't that revolutionary. Two years earlier the much better Bonnie and Clyde already promoted some of the same themes of Easy Rider. And in music bands like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Doors had already done the same with much more vigor then Easy Rider.

Still the movie is not entirely without its values. It has a great soundtrack. And it is sincere. Hopper and Fonda seem to really believe that living freely on the road is better then living in a suffocating city. They genuinely seem to admire the farmer who can provide his own food, without being dependent on industry and money. And no modern movie will play the scenes in the hippie commune straight. The modern movie would probably be right, but these scenes seem like really a testament to that period. It's not that there were really people living that way (at least I don't think so) but there were really people who hoped and believed that we could really live that way. That nowadays that hope is shattered is logical and good, but also a bit sad. And then there is Jack Nicholson's performance. He is only on screen for about 15 minutes, but during that time the movie feels really alive. Nicholson brings a lot of energy to the film. Sometimes you get the feeling that he knows that Fonda and Hopper are sleepwalking a bit and tries to wake them up. It's the performance that made him famous and rightly so. Unfortunately those 15 minutes may make the movie even more disappointing. We now really realize how good this movie potentially could have been.