Flower Power's Last Hurrah

Rating: 7/10 (1 May 2006)

"One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" feels like a movie lost in time because it is, a 1970s release set in the early 1960s, influenced by the late 1960s and, if the IMDb is an accurate measure (and I think it is) as popular today in a culture drastically different from those eras mentioned above.
Why is it ranked below only 11 other movies all-time as of this writing? I have no idea. It's an incredibly well-acted film, by a cast of no-names who would go on to popular careers (and two who didn't, Brad Dourif and Louise Fletcher, give the best performances). It masterfully builds tension, unfocused at first, to a point where it is barely endurable. There's nice bits of comedy to leaven the proceedings.
Jack Nicholson, whose lead performance as inmate R.P. McMurphy is also something of a title role, tells the director of the mental institution where he is being admitted that he got into trouble because he liked "fighting and f---ing" too much.
Normally a Nicholson film would leave it there, letting you soak in his rude, rough nature. Here the official gives the expected embarrassed nod, then raises his eyebrows. "In prison?" he asks, and it's McMurphy's turn to blush.
Ken Kesey's novel "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" came out just as the Camelot period of the 1960s was ending, and signaled the start of the "do-your-own-thing" ethos that permeated the rest of the decade and which Kesey himself preached. All that was just about over by the time the movie came out, and the message of doing your own thing had found widespread acceptance only in its mutated, discofied, coke-addled form.
The film is so committed to its gritty, realistic aesthetic that it never makes clear who to root for. McMurphy, more in the movie than the book, is out for himself, his interest in shaking up the inmates having less to do with any humanistic urges than a desire to have more interesting people around him to steal cigarettes from. Fletcher's Nurse Ratched is widely accepted as one of filmdom's great villainesses, except Fletcher's nuanced performance suggests someone more blinkered than bad, sincere in her concern for her charges, even McMurphy. When she does commit a rather harsh act late in the film, it's so out of character it feels like a cheat.
Maybe I'd like this film more if I was a bigger Nicholson fan, like everyone else. Especially in the 1970s, he always seemed to play variations on the R.P. McMurphy character. I'd be more impressed with Nicholson's career if he played Nurse Ratched. But it's a good film, very tough in the way director Milos Forman plays off the texture of the famous documentary "Titicut Follies." The acting is so naturalistic it's like the actors never knew when the cameras were rolling and just improvised.
It reminds me in that way of another film made in 1975, "Nashville." Me, I would have given "Nashville" the best picture Oscar over this. And I would have given "Jaws" the nod over both of them. But according to the voters of IMDb, the "Cuckoo's Nest" Oscar was one of the most deserved in history. Agree to disagree; it's a good film, whatever era it's supposed to be about.