Movie Review--One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

"I think we can help him."
--Nurse Mildred Ratched, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's very slow burn plot and fierce performances are its best components, with Jack Nicholson standing out as a particularly energetic and committed actor.  At most, there is a minimal need for effects and varied locations since the acting and wiring takes the lead.  This is a movie driven from start to finish by the plot and its characters; almost every scene hinges on the cast.  This emphasis is unfortunately accompanied by a general superficiality where the philosophical themes are concerned.  Individualism, mental illness, the myth of "normalcy," and the other themes that could have been incorporated very deeply end up getting explored only at a very surface level.

Production Values

The utter lack of need for anything beyond practical effects and physical filming sites leaves the characters to take the spotlight--and take the spotlight they do.  Jack Nicholson's intensity and acting talent is on full display as he plays a character to be evaluated for mental illness, even if his somewhat comparable characterization and performance in The Shining five years later has overshadowed his role in the former in mainstream recognition.  His Randle McMurphy can go from relatively calm to wildly animated in minutes, something that might be completely unsurprising to viewers familiar with some of his other major roles throughout his career.  Despite the wildness and simultaneous stability he brings to the character, there are others who deserve specific praise.  Nicholson is not the only cast member who stands out.

Nurse Mildred Ratched, who has just recently received her own Netflix show entitled Ratched that actually serves as a prequel to this very film, is one of the more noteworthy characters outside of the patient group influenced by McMurphy.  Louise Fletcher brings an indirect aggressiveness to Ratched as she acts what is now an example from the later years of Sarah Paulson's character from Ratched.  Other cast members include Brad Dourif and Danny DeVito, who play other patients besides McMurphy.  Their own strong performances make it clear that the psychological problems of their characters are far less ambiguous than those of Jack Nicholson's.  The actor who plays Dick Halloran in The Shining, Benjamin Crothers, even has a supporting role!

Story

Some spoilers are below.

Randle Patrick McMurphy is brought to a mental institution for psychological evaluation after allegedly committing statutory rape (which is not even rape by default in the first place) and engaging in multiple physical assaults, his strong personality almost immediately surfacing.  It is this intensity that brings him into conflict with Nurse Mildred Ratched.  Ratched's cold, firm leadership inspires McMurphy to develop a plan of escape against her after less extreme measures of pushback fail to budge her.  What Randle does not learn until weeks have passed is that he is one of the only patients who cannot walk away from the institution as soon as the whim strikes: most of his companions voluntarily came here.

Intellectual Content

The conceptual premise of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has a high degree of promise when it comes to exploring the nature of sanity and mental health, but it forgoes any deeper analysis of the concepts than that needed to get its characters from one scene to another.  No one needs an evaluation from another person to know if they have a specific mental disorder, yet McMurphy does not push back against fallacious epistemological criteria for "determining" if someone has a mental illness or is feigning it, opting to butt heads with Nurse Ratched instead.  McMurphy's insistence that his fellow patients are "no crazier than the average asshole" hints at the often purely arbitrary ways many people would distinguish sanity and insanity.  Ultimately, only pure rationality separates the two, meaning that involuntary sensory perceptions or lack of them (as in seeing things other people do not or vice versa), "odd" behaviors, and forceful personality traits do not logically establish that a certain person truly is insane.  However, denying or contradicting logical truths is the supreme form of insanity, and it is easy to find people who are guilty of this.

Conclusion

With Ratched's debut on Netflix, there has never been a better time for interested viewers who have not seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to watch it for the first time.  Fans of older films will likely enjoy watching Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher carry out their roles splendidly, while anyone who appreciates competent filmmaking of any era will find much to admire.  For all of its talented acting, though, it does nothing more than brush up against issues and themes that are much deeper than anything the movie tries to tackle.  That matters of psychology, sociality, and epistemology could have been explored far more directly and deeply means that the film is by no means the philosophical masterpiece it could have been, but it remains a masterpiece of acting and characterization in spite of this.

Content:
 1.  Violence:  A brief fistfight is shown onscreen.
 2.  Profanity:  "Goddamnit," "shit," and "fuck" are heard throughout the runtime.
 3.  Nudity:  A character is shown naked from behind as he runs out of a room, but the shot is not lengthy.