I don’t know what it is about movies about crazy people that tends to peak my interest, perhaps because I’m a bit of a psycho myself, but I keep watching them not trying to figure out how the characters interact with each other or how deep their pain must be, but instead trying to discover how much of myself do I see in them. So sure enough when I saw R.P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest I said “well fuck, let’s pray that I never wind up in a mental institution because with the exception of having a girl waiting for me, that outlandish, manipulating, sneaky psychopath is pretty much me in a nutshell…but with hair.”
Not realizing the rules of picking a mental institution over prison, Randall (Randle?) McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) fakes being insane thinking that the 45 days that he’s not in the joint will instead be spent living in the lap of luxury…if you consider drool a luxury (I’m still undecided). As he’s forced to take part in and develop an understanding for the rehabilitation process for as long as his doctors see fit, he decides to take it upon himself to incite a little chaos as a means of keeping his own sanity amongst his sanity-challenged wardmates and that’s where the movie really finds its charm.
In battle of “systems vs. logic,” (which is a battle I love fighting myself) we, the viewer watch as the boring, “let’s sit down and talk to each other” system of fixing people combats the “let’s watch a bunch of people forced to be disconnected from society enjoy some of that society again” logic. From announcing the World Series to kidnapping other patients to take them fishing, Randall’s methods make him an unofficial leader of the ward, and thus a target of the doctors who run it, though they don’t really have the grounds to do much either except to yell from their glass office to quiet down, so Randall truly is an inmate running the asylum.
Though it’s fun to watch the patients enjoy things the same way that we enjoy them, Cuckoo’s Nest doesn’t do too much to make it actually mean anything. Like mental masturbation, it’s nice while it’s going on, great when it climaxes, but in the grand scheme of things, nobody is really getting any long-lasting satisfaction out of it, which I’m unsure if that was supposed to be the message here or if we were just supposed to focus on Randall’s antics. The movie never really seems sure of what its goal is and ends in a way that really leaves you wondering why this all happened. I relate it a lot to Suckerpunch, which is a movie I despised with the passion of a thousand suns, where the main character does all the work for the benefit of others, not realizing their just going to be used as some heroic sacrifice because some films are too afraid to accept that the heroism of a man comes from the greatness of his actions, not so much whether or not he dies for them (oh yeah, spoiler alert by the way. The film’s from 1976…it’s your own fault).
I enjoyed this movie enough to give it 8 dustbusters out of 10. It was funny, sweet, sad, had all the great things that accompany a Best Picture, though it definitely wouldn’t have been an easy victory in my book (this coming from someone who has no fucking clue what else came out that year). It wasn’t a jaw-dropping experience, not one I’m going to sit and reflect on and say “wow” or anything along those lines, but it was just a really good watch. That’s all I have for this, I’m at a bit of a loss here, little punch drunk apparently.
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