One flew over the Cuckoo’s nest (1975)
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Louise Flecher, Brad Dourif, Danny DeVito, Will Sampson, William Harding, Christopher Lloyd
Director: Milos Foreman
Set
in an unnamed Oregon town in 1963, the setting of the film is the
town’s mental institution. The opening scene shows the admitting of 38
year old Randle Mc Murphy (Jack Nicholson), a criminal serving a
sentence for statutory rape of a minor, due to insanity, which the
viewer quickly realizes, is faked by him in order to avoid a longer jail
sentence. The doctor incharge is not convinced and he commits him to
one of the wards for observation till the insanity is proved or
disproved. His fellow patients in the ward include Billy Bibbit (Brad
Dourif), a 30 year old stammering suicidal nervous wreck who has a
deathly fear of his mother, Charlie Cheswick (Sydney Lassik), a timid
man prone to childish temper fits,the delusional Martini (Danny DeVito)
,Dale Harding (William Redfield) a well educated paranoid, the
morbid and profane Max Taber (Christopher Lloyd), Jim Sefelt (William
Duell) and finally, “Chief “ Bromden (Will Sampson), a gigantic native
American who is presumed deaf & mute, whose been there for almost
two decades.
The
institution is run by the domineering Nurse Mildred Ratched (Louise
Fletcher),who keeps the patients severely under control by the means of
mind numbing routine and therapy sessions, that McMurphy soon discovers,
are actually humiliation sessions, where the patients are made to tell
their personal problems presumably in order for resolving them through
consensus, but instead it only causes them to break down and fight
rabidly with each other. McMurphy at first enjoys thoroughly but his
smile fades as he sees Nurse Ratched smiling triumphantly, looking at
the squabbling patients.
McMurphy
also discovers that the patients fear Ratched and cannot do anything
which is disagreeable for her (the exception is Chief, who being deaf
& mute is excused from these sessions). Their fear of her is
stronger than their desire to get cured in order to return to the
outside world. He realizes that Nurse Ratched’s therapy sessions and the
institution’s schedule are designed more to keep the patients docile
and under control than curing them. Her complete control only means that
her superiors approve of her methods.
McMurphy
quickly becomes the dominant and most troublesome patient in the ward
by his complete disregard for authority and rules, like gambling in the
ante room and smoking and swearing loudly, refusing to take medication.
He begins challenging Ratched whenever possible.He once tries convincing
her for allowing the patients to watch a baseball game on
TV instead of listening to the routine monotonous music. She refuses.
McMurphy in defiance, stands in front of the switched off television
screen and starts shouting an imaginary commentary of a baseball game
which causes the other patients to disrupt the entire ward.
He
also bonds with the patients by the means of basketball game, this
causes the otherwise withdrawn Chief to silently admire him. In his most
daring move, he wrests control of the bus meant to take the patients on
a tour, herds his fellow patients aboard, picks up his prostitute
girlfriend Candy (Marya Small) on the way and on reaching the shore,
takes them all fishing in a boat after tricking its captain. The
patients have a time of their lives till the authorities finally
arrive.This is one of the only two outdoors scene in the entire film,
and it makes the viewer feel the brief freedom that the patients enjoy
in the open sea, away from the claustrophobic environment.
This
causes the hospital to tighten its restrictions on McMurphy and it even
considers sending him back to jail. McMurphy learns a startling fact:
The hospital holds the power to detain him, Billy and Chief
indefinitely. All the other patients in the ward, except the very hard
cases, are voluntarily committed and can leave anytime, but they don’t.
During one of the discussion session, Cheswick gets out of control and
McMurphy and Chief get into a fist fight with the guards. All are sent
for electrotherapy. While waiting for his turn, McMurphy learns to his
delight, that Chief has only been pretending to be deaf & mute all
this time to avoid attention. Upon his therapy, he returns with a stone
face and jerky movements much to the shock of his ward, but then
suddenly reanimates to everyone’s joy that this was just one of his
pranks.
That
same night, he decides that he has had enough and decides to escape, as
he cannot risk being sent back to prison. He asks Chief to come with
him, but he declines, stating his fear of the world. He calls Candy and
another girl, asking them to smuggle liquor with them. They sneak in,
and McMurphy even ropes in the warden in the liquor party involving the
patients, which quickly leads to the dismantling of the entire ward.
McMurphy
then starts bidding all the patients farewell and sees that Billy is
the most emotional to see him go. He decides, in his last act of infamy,
to have Candy spend a night with Billy, and the two retire into an
adjoining room. McMurphy and the other patients then, unluckily for
them, fall asleep owing to the combined effects of alcohol and the daily
medication.
Nurse
Ratched and the orderlies arrive in the morning to find the ward
wrecked completely. All the patients are summoned. McMurphy and Chief
are held back as they try to make a quick getaway. She is enraged to
find a half dressed Billy with Candy, who for the first time faces her
confidently without stammering. Ratched ,using her usual weapon against
him, threatens that she will tell his mother about it. Billy reverts to
his old stammering and nervous self, begging the nurse not to do
something like that. She calmly has the orderlies lock him
up in a room. Billy, unable to control his nervous breakdown, kills
himself with a pair of scissors. McMurphy is devastated and viciously
attacks Nurse Ratched when she tells the patients that “they should get
on with their routine”. He nearly strangles her to death before being
knocked down by the orderlies and taken away.
The
film then moves many days ahead. The ante room is shown with the
patients playing their usual card games, with all kinds of rumours
flying around about McMurphy, ranging from he has been subdued like a
lamb to he has escaped. The Chief listens curiously. Nurse Ratched is
shown smiling weakly, just a shadow of her former self.
Late
that night, as others sleep, McMurphy is brought in by a couple of
orderlies and laid on his bed. Chief rushes over to him and whispers
that they escape right away. Getting no response, the Chief tries
lifting him up and is horrified to find out that he has been lobotomized
(Lobotomy: Severing the nerves that connect the right hemisphere of the
brain with the left. It was a cruel way used in the earlier times to
subdue difficult mental cases). Chief decides that he cannot leave his
friend in such a pitiful existence to be seen by the other patients as a
symbol of Nurse Ratched’s victory. He suffocates McMurphy to death
before the others wake up. He then smashes the window of the ward by a
heavy slab and escapes, just as dawn breaks.
Based
on Ken Kesey’s novel of the same name, the film swept all the major
Academy awards, including best actor (Nicholson), actress(Fletcher),
director (Foreman) and film. The only one to lose out was Brad Dourif.
Jack
Nicholson makes Randle McMurphy an unforgettable character. He is the
soul of this film, and he plays the anti authoritarian, rebellious,
crazy and unpredictable character to perfection. His transformation from
a selfish repeated offender looking for an easy way out to a person who
eventually pays the ultimate price for his caring for his fellow
inmates (he gets quite a few chances to escape, and he chooses not to
everytime, in order to help his newfound friends, thereby sealing his
own fate) is marvelous.His performance is a lesson for any aspiring actor and a treat for any admirer of cinema.
Louise
Fletcher brilliantly plays one of most coldest villains in film
history. As Nurse Ratched, she personifies the system, which drives
everyone crazy in the guise of benifitting them. Of the supporting cast,
Brad Dourif as Billy Babbit, is the best as the tragically fragile
young man whose life is cruelly snuffed out of him. Small but
significant performances are given by Christopher Lloyd , William
Redding . Will Samspson as Chief Bromden is impressive.
The
word milestone is not used very often in cinema, and rarer is still a
film that lives upto the tag, like this one. Czech director Milos
Foreman adapts the novel with a few minor changes for the screen (in the
novel, Chief Bromden is the narrator and all the other inmates escape
in the end).The story uses the context of a mental institution to
portray the never ending and largely hopeless struggle of the individual
against the establishment. It shows , without any flowery promises that
this results in the certain destruction of the individual or the
section fighting it, but it has to be carried on for the
hope of change. The film ends in McMurphy’s defeat and destruction, but
he also ends up shrinking Ratched into a mere mortal from someone who
looks invincible. Out of the two people whose life he changes, Billy
meets a sad end, but Chief Bromden lives upto the hope sowed in him by
the doomed McMurphy, thereby signifying a little change that has been
acheived. Though some criticisms might be made for portraying the
inmates as someone McMurphy can use to carry out his adventures, it is
by a far excusable in this otherwise flawless film.As someone who
escaped from erstwhile Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring in 1968
(Soviet Union’s crackdown of anti communist forces in that country),
Foreman surely pours his understanding of fighting a totalitarian
establishment into the film beautifully. The largely interior settings
depicting the mental ward and the robotic movements and compliance of
the patients to the numbing schedule depicts the establishment’s total
domination of the individual is a contrast to the final scene of the
film which shows the dawn breaking through the smashed window from which
Chief Bromden escapes to an uncertain but welcome future.
What would you choose?
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