Excellent Film-making; Excellent Casting

Rating: 10/10 (30 March 2006)

Take a book like Ken Kesey's which did startle some and had a good following. I read it in a graduate English class. I remember setting it down and saying, "That's a pretty good book." It is well written with insights into the characters, but I didn't get the life I did in the movie. Throw a good director and some great character actors into a film like this; add Jack Nicholson, one of the most complex actors on the face of the earth; throw in Louise Fletcher with her soft spoken acts of terror; and you have a real film. Even though there are a few differences between the book and the movie, I actually enjoyed the book more the second time because the movie extended, for me, the depth of the characters. I don't know if Kesey would like to hear that, but sometimes it becomes a win win situation. The mental patients (some people choose to call them psychos which isn't fair) are wonderfully alive and full of their own being. Nicholson's character comes along and pulls out the humanity from them. I met some of the most wonderful people when I worked at a state mental hospital for a time (I now teach Junior High kids, which is a whole other issue). How would you like to be treated, given their setting? Medicated and controlled? There was a lot of that where I worked and I always thought, you may as well sentence them to death as treat them as you are. I think things are a bit more enlightened now. I think that maybe the movie helped a bit. This one has always been a top ten film in my book.