Movie Review: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

This week’s classic, (August 13th, 2017) on the I Hate Critics Movie Review podcast was One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Milos Forman’s remarkable Best Picture winning triumph. It’s been years since I had sat down to watch this remarkable film and I was surprised at just how powerful the film remains. The story of patients in a mental ward whose lives are upended when they meet Jack Nicholson’s firebrand, criminally insane, R.P McMurphy, is truly unlike any film of its era.

R.P McMurphy is a dangerous man, a volatile personality. McMurphy’s reputation as a stirrer of the proverbial pot seems ill-suited from the very beginning for Nurse Ratched’s (Louise Fletcher) orderly, scheduled, and heavily medicated psych ward. In fact, on McMurphy’s very first day we get signs of things to come as he mugs his way about stirring up his fellow patients with his antics. It seems certain from our perspective in the audience that McMurphy is going to be trouble, the only question is how much trouble.

In a typical movie, the story would be McMurphy’s antics but director Milos Forman establishes throughout One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that as entertaining as McMurphy is in the performance of the glorious Jack Nicholson, at the height of his charismatic powers, this isn’t a typical movie. We may delight at times in McMurphy’s antics, his escape attempts, his pot stirring, et cetera, but the movie is only here to observe a day to day progression of McMurphy, the patients around him and the staff of the hospital.

It’s a very hands off piece of direction wherein Forman doesn’t seem to be steering the ship of the story in any particular direction but rather, he’s holding back and keeping his distance. Forman’s style with Haskell Wexler’s exceptional camerawork is to observe the lives of these characters almost as if it were in real time. McMurphy isn’t some party starting wild man but a deeply troubled soul who is thoughtless toward others but also deeply loyal. He’s looking out for number one but he’s also genuinely empathetic and loving towards the friends he makes.

All of that, however, is perceived not from the contrivance of plot and the need to move the story forward but rather as a function of Nicholson and by extension McMurphy’s desperate need to continually shake up his environment. McMurphy is restlessness in human form, a wanderer by nature who has been caged so long it is as if his id were attempting to escape his mind as much as his body is attempting to escape incarceration.

Forman and Wexler observe McMurphy with the camera as the witness to his behavior and not some prodding agent. There isn’t much of a story in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, it’s a series of incidents in a linear form that feels like a cohesive story because our minds will it to be so. It’s the power of cinema and our training as film goers that propels One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as if it were a natural cinematic story.

Forman uses that against us in the end. By forcing us as audience members to fill in the gaps in time and story he draws us closer to these characters and as we round toward the inevitable tragedy that is no doubt coming at the end of the film we become swept up in the growing chaos cheered on by McMurphy. We can see what McMurphy can’t, that by pushing so hard against the ties that bind, he’s breaking himself and others. That’s not to say that we wish McMurphy would follow the rules, he’s far too interesting for us to wish for any less of his charm but we know what he doesn’t.

Those of us who’ve followed the rules and managed to have never had our freedom taken away find numerous ways to curb the instincts that might lead to trouble. We rationalize our way toward following the rules and staying out of trouble. That same rationalization is what draws us toward McMurphy, we envy his free spiritedness while pitying his inability to understand the ways in which civility in society is built around our rationalizing the use of our particular brand of freedom.

Sure, you could drive down the wrong side of the street or wander into a stranger’s home but those who do those things are punished and the rest of us, if we appreciate our freedom, learn from their example. McMurphy’s desire to break down those barriers makes him fascinating and dangerous. Add to McMurphy that rye Jack Nicholson smile and that twinkle of madness in his eyes and you have a very romantic character, especially in the eyes of those of us who’ve so willingly given over to the spoken and unspoken rules of civility.

When in the end R.P McMurphy is lobotomized and left to die in a nearly vegetative state, it’s not just a tragedy for McMurphy, it’s a tragedy for our romantic idea of iconoclasm, that desire we all have to see just a few of the rules broken. Who hasn’t wished for someone like McMurphy to come in and punch that guy at the bar who needs a good punch in the face? Who hasn’t wished that they had a friend like McMurphy to rouse them from the daily routine to engage in life again with just that hint of danger and crossing societal bounds?

McMurphy exists in many ways as a fantasy of freedom. It’s not that we aren’t free in our lives to do as we please, to find little sparks of madness in our own ways but it’s almost always within the confines of civil society, within the social contract. No one really wants to upset the apple cart. Watching McMurphy’s divine spark dimmed is a death not just for him but also for us as we find ourselves thrust back into our own seemingly mundane reality.

I’m coming off as if I don’t like my life but it’s not like that. I am happy and genuinely buoyed by the notion that so many of us are willing to honor and respect our fellow man and their place in the world. I don’t wish to constantly have adventures like those inspired by McMurphy at all times but it’s nice to think about those moments that are out of the ordinary and the people who make moments like that possible. It’s also likely that I enjoy watching someone like McMurphy from the safe distance of the movie screen as meeting people like him in person would be fun for a little while and then likely quite terrifying.

The thing I find fascinating here as that all of these rambling observations about McMurphy are mine and not Milos Forman’s. It’s important to note that Forman just observes McMurphy, how you take to him and his actions are entirely up to you. McMurphy is essentially part of the story you are writing in your mind and while McMurphy is, at times, steering the boat, Forman gives even his most outlandish antics like stealing a fishing boat following a daring escape from the hospital a distance and perspective that isn’t anything like a typical movie. It’s as if Forman and by extension us, were simply following McMurphy wherever he’s headed and if that happens to unfold like a piece of narrative fiction, that’s up to us.

That, for me, is what makes One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest so special. Much like his even greater masterpiece, Amadeus, Milos Forman gives our mind a place to reside and dream and infer and engage while he stands aside and creates something for us to discern. There is specificity of course but there is also enough wide open narrative space in Forman’s work for our minds to engage it in ways that other filmmakers could never imagine.

While other movies insist on telling a story, Forman seems happy to present life to us and invites us to fill in the story around the edges. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is, essentially, whatever you make of it and that level of engagement, that way of making us feel like part of the story is what makes the various moments of screaming joy and dreadful sadness so powerful, they remind us that while we may be taking part in this story, we don't control it, just as in daily life we act out notions of control while having very little.