The Good Stuff Is So Good You Can Overlook The Flaws

Rating: 8/10 (10 March 2013)

CUCKOO'S NEST is one of only three pictures in Hollywood history to win The Big Four at Oscar Time: Picture, Actor, Actress, and Director (the other two are 1934's IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT and 1991's THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS). And despite some serious flaws I have to admit it deserved every single one of those awards, because the things this movie does well it does so amazingly well that the story carries you along and you don't even think about the flaws until much later.
I won't bother to lay out any plot details; even people who haven't seen it know the basic premise: the film is basically a power struggle between R P McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), a con artist who fakes crazy to get better accommodations (the State Mental Hospital instead of the County Jail), and Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), a cold, manipulative, and power-hungry woman who treats the men in her care more like pieces on a chessboard than actual human beings. In brief, McMurphy and Ratched square off into one of the most memorable clashes of conflicting wills ever put on film. Those are the basics, and I'll stop there: if you don't know the rest, see the movie; it's worth it.
I also highly recommend reading the novel for comparison, because the book's author, Ken Kesey, is said to have hated the film because in his view it shifted the focus of the story from Chief Bromden (Will Sampson), who narrates the book as a sort of internal monologue and through whose eyes the action of the book plays out, to McMurphy.
I have a hard time understanding Kesey's negative reaction, because McMurphy is still the central character in the book despite the narrative voice of Bromden, and to have kept that narrative voice in the film would have been impossible. For one thing, Bromden spends half the story pretending to be a deaf-mute, fooling everyone including Ratched. Forman would have had to let the audience into the secret from the beginning; instead we discover it along with the entire cast. The only other things missing are Bromden's hallucinations, which would have been impossible to film even as recently as 1975; it could be done with CGI in today's technology, but I don't know as it would necessarily be an improvement. The only other difference I noted was that the fishing trip in the movie was the penultimate act of rebellion; in the novel the men have full permission from the doctor, who even goes with them. A bit hard to make the case for rebellion, though Nurse is, of course, far from happy about it.
Now for the flaws. To my mind, both the novel and the film have one HUGE flaw: the portrayal of women. Ken Kesey appears to have been heterosexual by all accounts, but watching the film (and especially reading the novel), it is easy to get the impression that he really hated women on some level. All the women in both book and movie fall into a variant on Freud's "madonna/whore" complex. The "madonnas" in this case are all emasculating ball-busters; be they nurses or wives, these ladies all "wear the pants" in whatever situation they are in. The whores are, well, whores: two prostitutes who are really the only pleasant female characters in this thing.
The other major flaw is that there is very little actual mental illness in this film. Bromden's hallucinations didn't make it to the screen, and the others, while somewhat neurotic, are far from sick enough to be hospitalized. One of them, Sefelt (William Duell), is an epileptic, hardly a reason to be inpatient. Their problems all seem to relate to the women in their lives, and Ratched has every one of them completely cowed. McMurphy's effect on them suggests that the culture of Momism has neutered these men and that the best therapy for them is simply to "act like guys." This misogyny is less pointed in the film than it is in the novel, but it's there nonetheless.
Still, these things are easy to miss in light of the film's staggering accomplishments. Jack Nicholson has never been one of my favorite actors, but the Oscars are full of occasions where the role and the actor were so perfectly matched that the actor owned it. Nicholson owned McMurphy; in fact to some extent he has been working with variations of the McMurphy persona ever since.
Louise Fletcher, an actress who up to that time had done mostly television, had to audition several times over the course of six months before finally getting the part of Nurse Ratched; director Milos Forman kept telling her she was not quite grasping the part yet kept calling her back to read, and she must have finally found the right notes, or Forman simply could not find anyone he thought was better. In the end it matters not at all: Fletcher's performance as the precise and icy Ratched is a memorable bit of acting, fully deserving of her Oscar, especially when you realize that the character as written is pretty one-note, which placed huge demands on her to make the woman, if not exactly sympathetic, at least interesting. And she goes beyond interesting: Ratched is fascinating in the way they say snakes can make their prey freeze and be unable to move just by nailing them with their eyes.
This film has an undeniable power, and even now it is easy to see why it is in the American Film Institute's Top 100 (#33, if that interests anyone). It entertains while making you think. The only thing is you might find yourself coming to some really unsettling conclusions.