A movie to remember (contains many spoilers!!!)

Rating: 10/10 (22 March 2016)

One Who Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is a movie about Randle McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson, who is transferred to a mental institution for mental evaluation from a prison farm. He hopes to avoid the hard work and relax the rest of his sentence by trying to pretend to be crazy. In the institution he meets a cast of characters such as Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif), Chief (Will Simpson), Martini (Danny Devito) and quite a few other people on the ward during his stay. The main nurse Mildred Ratched (Louis Fletcher) serves as the antagonist who keeps a firm hold on her ward, while Murphy mixes things up in the ward, really showing everyone how to live outside of Ratched's control.
The main theme in this movie is freedom. And not necessarily freedom from the institution itself, but freedom from the mental barriers that exist, possibly because of the institution. Of course everyone in the institution has some sort of mental setback, and they sit through the therapy sessions with Nurse Ratched, but these sort of sessions simply point out their issues, and don't necessarily instill any self-confidence in the individuals themselves, and bury themselves deeper into their issues. Such as when Nurse Ratched gives Billy a hard time when he speaks about the time he told a girl he wanted to marry her, but never told his mother about the relationship in the first place; instead of providing any helpful insight to this issue. This all changes of course, when McMurphy comes into the picture. He brings a sense of life into the institute, and helps instill individualism in each member of the ward, being able to speak up for themselves. Such as the scene where Cheswick speaks up about wanting his cigarettes when Ratched starts to ration them since the boys would lose all their cigarettes to McMurphy while betting on card games.
McMurphy even convinces Chief to stop playing dumb and deaf, and finally leave the ward. This plan all goes south, however, when during a party Billy sleeps with Candy and Nurse Ratched finds out. Billy commits suicide after the nurse tells him that she will tell his mother about his escapades. McMurphy strangles Ratched, leaving her in a neck brace. He is however, given a lobotomy essentially making him a vegetable. While McMurphy didn't come in with a mental illness, he did have one now. Chief, seeing how his spirit was broken, knew it was the time for freedom. He freed McMurphy of his body by smothering him with a pillow, then breaking the glass with the large marble counter in the tub room, running off into the sunrise. He gave McMurphy the freedom he would want, and the spirit of freedom was instilled into the rest of the ward, as they cheered on Chief when he ran.
While it's hard to say what would happen to the ward after the fact, the spirit of freedom still lives on in all of them, along with the true memory of McMurphy. No one else saw him as the vegetable he became, so the hope and power given to them may convince them to have the self-confidence to leave the ward, as many were there voluntarily.