Perhaps I shouldn't have been overly surprised that One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) bit the big one, considering that it was directed by Milos Foreman, who also gave us the turgid Amadeus, the first entry in this "series". But boy, did I despise this movie. I've had two days to chew this film over and despite hearing many arguments to the contrary, I find it repulsive and borderline awful.
In case it needs to be said, I am only judging the movie. I have never read Ken Kesey's novel (although Kesey seems to have disliked the adaptation) so all comments are directed at Foreman's adaptation. And what an awful adaptation. I can think of a number of "classic" movies that have let me down, but it's hard for me to think of one that inspired such active dislike - maybe Apocalypse Now or The Graduate? At least Amadeus and Barry Lyndon, the two previous entries in this series, were quite acomplished technically. This film has nothing going for it whatever aside from a few good performances, and a skewed worldview that's not a bit disturbing - not to mention a completely hateable protagnoist.
R.P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) is a career criminal who feigns insanity to get out of prison and escape into the "easy life" at a mental institution. Unfortunately, R.P. doesn't reckon with the strictness of Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), the asylum's head nurse, who rules over her patients with an iron fist. R.P. then starts a one-man campaign of harrassment against Ratched, that begins for the hell of it but eventually does a better job of treating the patients (Brad Dourif, Christopher Lloyd, Danny DeVito, Will Sampson) than Ratched's strict authoritarian style, and we all learn something about how to treat the mentally ill, and thus ourselves. Or something.
Given that Foreman's direction is strictly kitchen sink, without any discernable style or flair, Cuckoo's Nest inevitably succeeds or fails on the merits of its story and characters, and that will be my primary basis for criticism. Not only is the film's message dated and garbled, the character of McMurphy is hideously unlikeable, and thus the film is borderline unwatchable.
Let's take a look at Nurse Ratched, a character who has come to represent evil incarnate since the novel (and film)'s release. She's certainly an intriguing character, helped a great deal by Louise Fletcher's subtle performance, but I fail to see her as evil. Certainly, the imputations that are often made of her - that she is a power-hungry narcissist who loves to hurt people - ring false for the most part; if anything, I'd argue the opposite. Her two most "evil" actions, her forbidding the patients to watch the World Series and her arguing against McMurphy's release from the asylum, are the only ones that show any degree of calculation on her part. She is a martinet who believes that strict authoritarianism is the way to treat her patients; rather like the jerk teacher who sent you to detention for talking after the bell in high school. The scene where she tries to intimidate Billy (Brad Dourif) into submission by threatening to tell his mother about shows the crux of the problem: she is misguided in her approach, and due to personality flaws badly unsuited for her job, but I see no evil intent in her words and actions. Her grudge against McMurphy, although horribly inappropriate for the situation, is certainly understandable given the deliberate campaign of wickedness the latter unleashes. In my opinion, the worst that could be said of Nurse Ratched is that she's perpetrating a bad system - but what is the alternative?
The movie's railing against the outdated asylum system is valid up to a point, although dated; lobotomies and electroshock therapy are used as much for punishment as treatment, and the isolation and treatment they receive from Ratched harms as much as it helps. This is fair enough; clearly isolating the mentally ill from society and treating them as robots rather than human beings does them little good. However, is the alternative of letting them run wild really better? Record levels in homelessness and unemployment since this change in attitudes towards the mentally ill suggest otherwise. My experiences at Pitt, which has one of the highest concentration of homeless and mentally ill people in America (evident by the dozens if not hundreds of derelicts hovering around campus), show that the alternative to the system under attack by the film is no less desirable, and the debate over treating the mentally ill is one not easily answered. Surely there must be a middle ground, but we as a society have yet to find it.
That being said, it's not like McMurphy, a two-bit criminal and life-long hell-raiser, would care about such a debate anyway. I don't buy the idea that he becomes enlightened and decides to help his fellow inmates out; to me, it seems just as plausible that he's pissed off about being committed rather than any sort of high-mindedness. Do we really believe that such a clearly self-interested and hateful character develops a moral conscience? The movie does try to suggest that his methods of "treatment" (tormenting the Nurses, leading the patients on a "vacation", causing riots, beating up orderlies and having a drunken party with trailer park sluts) work better than Ratched's, but it's not really convincing; at best, this is deck-stacking. At worst, it's completely disingenuous. And either way, it's very hard to believe that McMurphy of all people has the interest of anyone but himself at heart. He's an unlikeable scumbag, who whether or not he really is psychotic clearly has some sort of problem. The fact that he's a rebel does not automatically entitle him to my sympathy as a viewer.
The fact is that Cuckoo's Nest is not a diatribe against the state of mental health care in the US. It's an allegorical representation of '60s counter-culture, using a mental asylum to represent American society. This rather garbles the point, and I would suspect the message - that authority is evil and corrupt and rebellion, consequences be damned, is the answer - would be much more problematic were this film set in, say, a prison. Society may be corrupt, but clearly there are problems it needs to address, however imperfectly - otherwise institutions like prisons and asylums would not exist. Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, although not a favorite of mine, shows that both omnibus approaches to "treating" social ills, be it mental illness or crime, are equally flawed and ridiculous. This level of subtlety, however, is beyond the hip anti-authoritarianism of this film, which assumes that its audience will automatically be on the side of the outsider and the rebel, and blame society for all of the world's problems rather than individuals.
Any movie involving the mentally defective is an invitation for actors to chew scenery with reckless abandon, from Forrest Gump to Ryan's Daughter to I Am Sam - not to mention garnering some easy Oscar nods (inspiring Robert Downey Jr.'s excellent "Retard" speech in the otherwise mediocre Tropic Thunder). And such is the case here. Jack Nicholson gives his usual manic performance, and the fact that his character is pretending to mentally unbalanced certainly does little to dissuade him. I'm not a Nicholson fan by any means, and while I enjoy some of his performances (Chinatown, A Few Good Men) I also think his scenery chewing is often simply self-indulgent excess. The fact that Nicholson has such a repulsive character to play doesn't help matters, but his portrayal of McMurphy makes his turn in The Shining look like a piece of Paul Scofield underacting.
The supporting cast contains mostly ham actors chewing lots of scenery, with Christopher Lloyd, Brad Dourif and a youngish Danny DeVito among them. Will Sampson's almost-wordless part as the Chief is an exception, and he gives a refreshingly subtle performance that stands out amidst the scenery-chewing. Louise Fletcher's turn as Nurse Ratched is wonderfully subtle, and to her credit she doesn't play the character as evil incarnate. There's also a small part for Nicholson's Shining victim Scatman Crothers, here being victimized by Jack in an entirely different fashion.
So, on the whole, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is, in the words of the great Alan Mount, "excrement of the most fetid variety". When I find myself cheering for a character widely considered of cinema's nastiest villainesses, I think there's a problem on one end or the other.
Rating: 4/10 - Avoid (although 95% of readers will no doubt disagree)
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