Synopsis
Randle P. McMurphy, charged with assault and statutory rape -behaviour
he cheerfully acknowledges but justifies - is transferred from a penal
work farm to the State Mental Hospital where, suspected of faking to
avoid work detail, he is held for observation. Irrepressibly cheerful,
he soon clashes with Nurse Ratched, who sees her efforts to soothe
disturbed minds upset by his war on apathy: substituting a porno deck
for the cards used in the ward, introducing cigarettes as gambling
currency, persuading the hitherto submissive patients to demand changes
in the ward schedule, organising a truant excursion for an afternoon of
deep-sea fishing which is enjoyed by all. After a disturbance in the
ward, provoked partly by McMurphy's discovery that unlike the voluntary
patients he is not free to leave, and partly by Nurse Ratched's bland
intransigence, McMurphy is given shock treatment along with two other
patients, one being Chief Bromden, a massive, morose and supposedly
deaf-and-dumb Indian. Chief now tells McMurphy that he is using the
asylum as a refuge from the world that destroyed his father, but says
that he is not ready when the delighted McMurphy invites him to escape.
Nevertheless, McMurphy contrives to have two girls, Candy and Rose,
bring supplies of liquor (and a car) to the ward one night. At his
farewell party, McMurphy postpones his departure so that a severely
repressed boy, Billy Bibbit, can be entertained by Candy. Next morning,
the patients are found sleeping it off in the ward. Discovered in
Candy's arms and harried back into his sexual trauma by Nurse Ratched,
Billy commits suicide. Attempting to strangle Nurse Ratched, McMurphy is
removed for a lobotomy that leaves him catatonic. Contemplating the
wreck that was once McMurphy, Chief smothers him with a pillow and
fulfils his escape plan.
Review
As the New Testament of the flower-power, acid-trip counterculture,
reputedly sharing the same real-life inspiration for its anti-hero as
the movement's founding gospel, Kerouac's On the Road, Ken Kesey's novel
not unnaturally retains a quaint period flavour difficult to shake off
entirely. When Jack Nicholson's shaggily uncouth McMurphy first erupts
into the State Mental Hospital to shatter its hygienic calm with a burst
of raucous laughter as he plants a kiss on the startled warder
accompanying him, the area of conflict is clearly outlined. Make love
not war is the message; and in the earlier part of the film especially,
McMurphy's tactics tend to be as farcically fantastical as the
high-jinks of Mr. Roberts, and occasionally - as in the shot of a
catatonic patient smiling beatifically after being plied with wine
through a feeding-tube — as irresponsible and as irrelevant to any
realistic situation as the 'make love not war' formula itself. About
midway through the film, two things happen, transforming a facile tract
about the repressive society into an honest polemic. One is the process
of terrible retribution inaugurated by McMurphy's subjection to shock
treatment: in no matter what circumstances should the things done to
these patients be done even to a dog. Forman gradually begins to build a
cold steady anger, not so much because McMurphy's rough-and-ready
methods are necessarily the answer to the problem as because they
demonstrate by reductio ad absurdum that the apathy of the patients is
outweighed by that of the staff; in other words, that it is policy to
preserve any sort of status quo rather than risk upsetting any
applecarts. The second happening is the sudden metamorphosis, when he
reveals his sanity and his ability to talk, of Chief Bromden from
passive object into active subject. Part of the problem with the earlier
part of the film is that whereas Kesey's original - written under the
influence of LSD and conceived as a subjective narrative by the Indian -
interwove fragments of documentary description with flights of
schizophrenic fancy, Forman's film has initially to be taken as
realistic, with McMurphy as a dangerous meddler. When the hitherto
totally wooden Indian suddenly comes alive, however, taking over
McMurphy's central role as a sane man representing our own sane
viewpoint, the result is that everything which happened before is
simultaneously exposed as fantasy (McMurphy, in other words, is mad) and
justified as a realistic emotional reaction to an intolerable situation.
It is a brilliant stroke which not only provides the film with an
equivalent to Kesey's subjective narrative but, in that the Indian still
trails his now unspoken racial history behind him, implies that in him
freedom is making its last stand against extermination. As one might
expect, given the way Forman's characters are almost invariably
presented as isolated units, uncertain whether to laugh or cry, whether
they will be welcomed or bitten as they peer myopically out of their
solitude, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has no problems with the
problem of enacting madness. Forman has defined his approach by saying,
"I can only define 'mental illness' as an incapacity to adjust within
normal measure to ever-changing, unspoken rules. If you are incapable of
making these constant changes, you are called by your environment
crazy". His uniformly brilliant cast (doubtless enormously aided by the
fact that the film was shot on location in the Oregon State Hospital
with, apparently, a number of real patients as extras contributing to
the ambience of tranquil withdrawal) are therefore presented, basically,
as entirely normal: one accepts Chief Bromden first as crazy, then as
sane, with equal conviction and without having to make any mental or
visual adjustment. Their difference lies purely in that inability to
adjust to rules - like Martini's destruction of all group games, or
Cheswick's need to be an ally no matter what the circumstances - which
makes their behaviour both exquisitely funny and infinitely touching.
And once, at least, the film takes us right through the looking-glass
into a world where fact is ruled by fantasy: the scene where Nicholson
treats the cheering patients to a baseball commentary in front of a dead
TV set whose blank screen, dimly reflecting the excited audience, seems
to come alive with the spectacle.
Synopsis and Review from Monthly Film Bulletin Vol.43 No.505 February
1976 p.32-33
