Enjoyable - for the wrong reasons

Rating: 6/10 (7 April 2015)

Pretty fitting that I chose to watch this during the most manic, frustrating day of work ever - after I nearly had a fist fight with a printer, I really started to identify with these guys.
The problem with taking on a film with as many plaudits as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is that, if you don't absolutely adore it, you feel like you have to justify why you 'only' like it. This is ridiculous, of course - remember when you were a kid and 'like' or 'don't like' was a binary option? - but when everybody else is so convinced that this is a 10/10 masterpiece, there's always an urge to justify, even if only to yourself, why it's only worth 6, 7, or 8 to you.
My own justification comes in two parts. Firstly, I find it very hard to identify with any of the characters in this film in any meaningful way. There are flashes of brilliance from McMurphy that have me on his side - the fake insanity after his electroshock therapy being the pick of the bunch - but for the most part his entire attitude to his situation is too self-defeating for me to support him (it's tough to cheer somebody on when you know they're ultimately being stupid). The Chief exacerbates this by being, on one hand, the most intelligent and sensible person on the ward, making McMurphy look worse in comparison - on the other though, he may be the most inexcusable (his silence implies a kind of selfishness, and if he's on the ward voluntarily, which is never made quite clear, then his existence and motives become hard to rationalize). Everybody else is just too crazy or irrelevant, except for Nurse Ratched.
Nurse Ratched is the biggest problem, because as far I'm concerned she's the most sympathetic character in the entire movie. I'm actually shocked to learn that she's meant to be the 'bad guy' - she's no hero, don't get me wrong, but I thought the entire point of the film was to be ambiguous, to keep it a mystery whether or not The Chief and McMurphy are actually crazy and whether or not the system has failed them. Apparently not, if the bulk of the reviews I've read are to be believed, and that has to be a failing. She's meant to be the character you end up hating, and to me she's a woman doing an impossible job as best she can, while dealing admirably with more crap than anybody should ever have to put up with in their 9-5. The scenes that are meant to show 'humiliation' of the patients (other people's words, not mine) strike me as nothing of the sort; that's just what group therapy's like, isn't it? Even the great event that's meant to drive your hatred home merely highlights the ambiguity of the film for me - Billy's suicide is apparently meant to be something you blame on Ratched, but as far as I'm concerned, the guard and McMurphy are both just as guilty as Ratched is.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I felt more anger towards Ben Stiller in Happy Gilmore.
The second problem is casting. Now, I accept that this is probably a harsh thing to judge a film on years after the fact, but it feels like every actor here has gone on to be in roles that are either greatly exaggerated parodies of what they do here (Jack Nicholson), or are just straight-up more memorable (Danny DeVito), or both (Christopher Lloyd). My fault for not seeing this first, I guess, but it's hard to take the plight of mental health seriously when it's presented to you by Doc Brown from Back to the Future, Jack from The Shining, the biology teacher from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and any number of Danny DeVito characters. It's not that they're been in other roles that's the problem, or even that they've been in better roles - it's that the enforced, hammy wackiness of their later careers makes their performances in this film much less poignant by comparison. (Is it a co-incidence that Chief and Ratchet, the two 'straight' characters, are the only ones that I didn't instantly know from another film?) That, I suppose, is forgivable, but what's less easy to overlook is that Nicholson and Louise Fletcher are the most visually unremarkable people in the film. You're meant to be focusing on them and their power struggle, and instead your eyes can't help but drift to the likes of Chief, Billy, or Max because they all have instantly recognisable faces of physiques. On paper it's a great ensemble cast, but they take the shine off each other a little.
It's still a very good film though, despite this. The apparently accidental ambiguity I've been referring to makes it a compelling watch, as the natural urge to find some kind of obvious, conclusive side to choose or to work into an obviously happy or sad ending is never resolved. It's a film that presents death - twice - in a way that's tragic but little else, which avoids Hollywood's normal obsession with making it either heroic, or deserved, or making it a vital launchpad for the storyline. Here, it happens and then that's pretty much it - I don't necessarily think the film would be any different without those deaths, and I like that. It's another facet of this film's greatest strength; it asks big questions, puts you in very awkward moral and societal positions, then leaves you to figure it out yourself. But if that's not intentional - and the tagline, the book, and the fact that everybody in the IMDb boards who agrees with me is automatically called out as a troll all suggest it's not - then how much credit should I really be dishing out for it?