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.
