Kesey lite

Rating: 9/10 (2 February 2000)

I love this movie. It is direct, powerful, funny and sad and uplifting, and, I think, perfectly proportioned. Nevertheless, I can understand why Kesey allegedly won't watch the movie. The man imagined the whole story and wrote the book, and he told the story the way he believed it should be told. In his tale, a shock-shopworn lunatic lives with McMurphy in the hospital and, through his influence, learns the meaning of freedom. Or something like that. Kesey's novel is written in first-person by the lunatic, Chief Bromden - the deaf, dumb, crazy Indian. In the book, Bromden is observant, imaginative, smart, and at least a little daffy, especially in the first half. Readers enjoy the progress of Bromden toward functional sanity and appreciate more fully how McMurphy's example of "free living" affected the entire ward. The movie works much better than it should, because it doesn't even try to capture the flavor of the book. It retells the key events of Kesey's novel, as though the book were nothing but a plot with dialogue. Fortunately the plot is strong enough to survive simplification, compression, and pragmatic alterations (e.g. keeping a character who commits suicide midway through the book alive all through the film, apparently to keep the tragedies to a bare dramatic minimum). The ending of the film, with Jack Nizsche's uplifting "Native American" theme, is a knockout. If there is anyone who has neither seen this film nor read the book, I'd recommend seeing the film before plunging into the book. That way, both can be enjoyed to the fullest extent.