It's a Comedy in the Truest Sense: It's a Tragedy, Too.

Rating: 10/10 (7 February 2011)

Whether it's better or not, the persistent battle in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and whom it's between serves as a secluded epitome of the culture hostilities of the 1970s more creatively, engagingly and powerfully than Joe, Midnight Cowboy or Five Easy Pieces before it, matched perhaps only in that regard by They Shoot Horses, Don't They? The big difference is that Cuckoo's Nest is hilarious, and a comedy in the truest sense: It's also a tragedy. There's a quietly unmitigated close-up of Nicholson a little more than halfway through. We become aware of it because it hangs on warily. It shows R.P. McMurphy pensive. It comes at the match point flanked by the mirth and mischief of the previous portion of the film, and the closing deterioration into misfortune. What is he feeling? Is he plotting more insubordination? Grasp that all is hopeless? The vagueness of what McMurphy is thinking is the film's driving ambiguity. It all leads up to a late scene where he's found asleep on the floor next to an open window. Has his soul finally expired? Subdued for the post-classical '70s into a fable about society's imposition of conformism, it almost knowingly disregards the truths of mental illness so as to turn the patients into a set of snuggly characters ready for McMurphy's egging on. We learn that one is not actually mute, one doesn't have to stammer, and others need not be debilitated by introversion or dread. They'll be healed not by Nurse Ratched's medication, Muzak and counseling sessions, but by McMurphy invigorating them to be guys, to watch the World Series, go fishing, play basketball, get smashed, get laid. The memo for these miserable patients is: Be like him.
The movie's naive attitude toward psychosis is not actually a weakness of the movie, as it has no concern with being about that. It's about a freethinker in a lockstep system. Nurse Ratched, who is so uncompromising, so insipidly certain she's right, characterizes the American "cult of motherhood" at its militant maximum, and McMurphy is the local color who wants to escape from her form of society. The movie is among other things deeply afraid of women. The only two depicted optimistically are McMurphy's hooker acquaintances Candy and Rose. I mean this as an comment, not a censure.
McMurphy's backstory is inferred early on. He was sentenced to a prison farm for doing the deed with an underage girl, and has been sent to the mental institution for "evaluation." He's observably a rabble-rouser, and yet acutely egalitarian: He takes the patients head-on, treats their disorders as choices that can be reordered, and attempts by pure power of determination to break them free into a nibble of independence. The movie views them that way, too. The cinematography and editing provide reaction shots that nearly always have the same implication: A given patient's rigid expression is misconstrued thanks to the new perspective given by McMurphy. For instance, McMurphy has stolen the boat and has the group aboard. When he's interrogated, he introduces them all as doctors, and there are quick cuts to close-ups of each one looking vaguely formal like clockwork. This has nothing to do with mental illness but everything to do with slapstick.
Nicholson's performance is one of the acmes in a lengthy career of enviable anarchists. Jack is a much-loved American presence. And if his performance is rightly praised, Louise Fletcher's, notwithstanding the Oscar, is not valued enough. This may be since her Nurse Ratched is so meticulously loathsome, and since she exemplifies so utterly the traits we all have been trained to fear in a particular variety of female authority, a woman who has fused sexuality and sympathy into responsibility and rectitude. Dressed in her distantly militaristic nurse's uniform, she is at once bondage mistress and dungeon master, followed everywhere by the petite, non-speaking nurse who is her altar assistant.
Since we react so ardently to her we barely see Fletcher's performance. Her uncanny composure, her pokerfaced "fairness," her obstinate observance of policy, as in the scene where she orders McMurphy to get a majority vote in order to watch the World Series on TV, regardless that a majority of the patients don't comprehend what they're voting on. Later, when McMurphy's ultimate fortune is settled on, note how the male overseer hesitantly proposes he be returned to the prison farm, though Ratched resolutely gainsays him.
This great human comedy stays everlastingly well-liked as a subversive fable, but realizes its triumph by thoughtfully electing to utilize the mental patients as droll exaggerations. This initiates the fishing excursion, which is simultaneously the most enjoyed, and the most deceptive, scene in the movie. It's McMurphy's noble-cheerful flip of the bird at Ratched and her breed, but the oomph of the sequence can't camouflage the anxiety and bewilderment of men who, in several instances, don't know where they are, or why. Bear in mind by contrast the understated, late-night monologue by the Chief, who talks about his father. This is a window into a genuine character with genuine and fascinating issues, and leads up to the bittersweet release of the very final scenes.