Nicholson shines in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"

Rating: 8/10 (25 August 2014)

While watching Milos Foreman's "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", it occurred to me that I've been on a real psych movie kick lately. Shutter Island, Good Will Hunting, Cuckoo's Nest...I even caught myself looking at YouTube videos of Titicut Follies the other day. Psychiatry is often portrayed in a negative light in the media-- as a field of medicine where pedophiles and monsters pump their patients full of pills and electroshock while caging them like animals. While the field has come a long way in the last hundred years, the early 20th century was marred with highly dangerous and pseudo scientific procedures and patterns of inhumane treatment toward patients. "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" is, among other things, a commentary on the barbarism of mid-century psychiatry.
An adaptation of the classic anti-establishment novel by Ken Kesey, "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" follows the free-spirited criminal Randall McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) as he is being admitted to an Oregan mental hospital. Randall aims to be declared insane so that he may ride out his short prison term in what he feels will be a comparatively comfortable setting. McMurphy is put in a ward with quite an eclectic cast of characters including the 6'5" Native American "Chief" Bromden (Will Sampson), stuttering suicidal Billy Bibbit (Brad Douriff, who would later go on to play Wormtongue in the Lord of the Rings movies), the diminutive Mr. Martini (Danny DeVito, a connection I didn't notice until well over halfway through the movie!) and the spastic "Taber" (Christopher Lloyd). Shortly after his admission to the hospital, McMurphy begins to notice that many of the patients are being abused and degraded, kept in submission by the tyrannical and calculating Head Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). McMurphy bands together with the other patients in his ward to mount a rebellion against the oppressive Ratched, causing more than a few riotous moments.
This film is intellectual gold. Aside from being immensely culturally relevant (a strong theme of individuality v. authority/establishment is felt throughout) the film is a scathing commentary on the state of mental health treatment in the 1960's (Ken Kesey based the story on his experience working in a VA Hospital in Palo Alto, California). The means and methods of treatment were inelegant and at times did more harm than good, while patients were stripped of their individuality and reduced to helpless subhuman husks of men in hospital Johnny coats. The dialog is smart, the direction is spot on (a number of the extras were actual mental patients, and the actors supposedly stayed in character between takes). The film lacks any true emotional content, save for the final scene, but overall I found it to be thoroughly satisfying.