The Oscar Project #48: One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

by Chris Marshall:

I’ve seen One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest on multiple occasions, perhaps more than any other Best Picture winner except Forrest Gump, but I had somehow forgotten how good—and how powerful—a film it is. Few other movies can elicit this kind of emotional response.

Personally, the primary emotion I feel while watching it is anger. Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) manages, in a decade full of films filled with pretty awful people, to be the most despicable of all. She represents the worst kind of authority figure; it’s as if her entire purpose is to make the patients’ lives as awful as possible.

Or at least that’s the way it seems to Randle P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson). I’m not entirely convinced that the rest of the patients feel so negatively toward her, despite the cold, unfeeling exterior she displays when talking to them. Of course, the key difference between McMurphy and the others is that the others are actually insane, or at least have real mental issues to deal with. He has taken malingering to the next level, though, feigning mental illness to get off his work farm, assuming that being institutionalized will be a much cushier gig than forced labor.

Obviously, he has a rude awakening in store for him. Between Ratched and a group of fellow patients who are, to put it mildly, difficult to bond with, life in the asylum becomes unbearable. McMurphy begins taking wild chances and behaving very irresponsibly in response, and this works to his detriment. In jail, he would get out in 68 days. In the institution, he’s there until they say otherwise.

Some of his chicanery feels justified, though. When Ratched refuses his request to watch the World Series, even though he has a majority of votes from the other patients in the therapy group, it feels like a petty attempt to keep him from ever having his way. She denies him on the grounds that he doesn’t have a majority of the entire ward, even though those not in therapy are too far gone to vote anyway.

The film presents the viewer with quite a moral dilemma. Objectively, there is no doubt that many, if not most, of McMurphy’s actions are unacceptable. But at the same time, when he lashes out against Ratched, it’s so hard not to cheer him on.

I’m not exactly sure what to make of this, but One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the fifth Best Picture winner in a row to have a criminal (Popeye Doyle wasn’t exactly a criminal, but his sort of vigilantism is generally frowned upon) as its main protagonist. Doyle, the Corleones, Johnny Hooker, and McMurphy really aren’t the best people in the world, but each of them is a fascinating anti-hero.

This type of protagonist had really never been in any of the other Oscar Project films. The main characters were sometimes rapscallions and sometimes of low moral character, but never criminals. That’s a big change, and I have to assume the trend caught on at least in part due to the popularity of Bonnie and Clyde in 1967. But whatever the reason, fully half of the 1970s is dominated by this new kind of hero.

I once bore a striking resemblance to Brad Dourif.

This film was the second to win all of the Big Five Oscars (picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay) after It Happened One Night, and all of the awards were deserved. That being said, it should not obscure the work of a truly outstanding supporting cast, which featured, among others, Scatman Carothers, Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, and Brad Dourif. All four are, at least for me, beloved to a lesser or greater degree, and as jarring as it is to see them so young, their talent was already there.

Perhaps the movie is manipulative, as some have argued, but it’s manipulative in a positive way. Milos Forman knows how to pull all the right strings. When he wants the audience to be angry, the audience is angry. When he wants them to be sad, they’re sad. That’s a talent many filmmakers would kill for.

Just as a final note, I realized today while watching this that Chief is one of my favorite characters in all of cinema. His interactions with McMurphy are indescribably great, and without saying a word, he does a masterful acting job.

I really don’t even know how to describe what “kind” of movie this is. Much of it plays like a comedy, but if it is, it’s just about the saddest comedy ever made. But I’m totally fine with this ambiguity. The greatest films tend to transcend these easy categorizations, and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is no exception.