A Missed Oprotunity

Rating: 6/10 (24 May 2018)

6.5/10
One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest relies on the power of the setting and natural talent of the actors to compel the viewer to an emotional connection with the characters, but the tactic simply falls flat, making for a drab and uninteresting film.
The first issue I have with the movie was the weak connections between characters. Despite stellar individual performances from Jack Nicholson (R.P. McMurphy), William Redfield (Harding), Danny DeVito (Martini), and Brad Dourif (Billy Bibbit) the film fails to build anything more than surface level connections between the characters. Throughout the story the audience is left with a sense of dissatisfaction from meaningless interactions between characters that fail to have any real consequences, something I will touch on more later.
The second main issue I have is the atmosphere of the movie. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest had the potential to create substantial fear and anxiety for the viewer by making Nurse Ratched and the ward some dangerous and hostile towards our group of patient protagonists, but instead the atmosphere of the ward comes off as bright and welcoming and Ms. Ratched's threats never seem to carry any weight. This goes back to character actions not having any consequences, the primary problem in the film. Throughout the film we see characters make decisions that break the rules of the ward, but we never see any consequences that these actions have until the very end of the movie. For example, when the patients break out of the ward and go fishing they receive no punishment for breaking the rules. The same is true when McMurphy punches through the window: no consequences. The only time we see a major consequence for a character action is when McMurphy undergoes the shock treatment and lobotomy, but by this point it is too late to make it meaningful. More on-screen consequences would have made the ward more dangerous and Nurse Ratched a figure to fear. Instead we get an carefree romp of a movie when we could have had a meaningful story about a group of strangers bonding together to become better people.