jentleman film journal.

Changes in the Nest

Or, The AFI List Project #33: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Milos Forman may be one of the most obscure of all our directors: despite a career stretching from 1965 to today (his next film, The Ghosts of Munich, is expected in 2012), he has made only ten movies and is one of the great examples of the ‘oh, didn’t he direct…’ school. (Other notable members: Peter Weir, Wolfgang Petersen.) Yet he is also arguably one of our greatest filmmakers. He made two highly-acclaimed and culturally significant movies, Hair and The People vs. Larry Flint, in addition to two of the undisputed cinematic masterpieces of the twentieth century in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus. Those films, however, are more highly regarded than the man who made them.

Whatever the reasons for that, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is certainly deserving of all the praise that it receives: it’s one of only a very few movies about mental illness that successfully avoids turning mental illness into a gimmick, and it turns out that its setting in a mental hospital is, somehow surprisingly, an ideal laboratory for making a film about power. Why surprising? Well, I suppose because it takes advantage of our prejudices as an audience: it’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that, because these characters are in the loony bin, they really need to have someone else taking care of them and telling them what to do. Not to take anything away from The Shawshank Redemption, but when we see prison guards abusing prisoners in that movie, it is – like too many movies set in prisons – driving home a point we have already seen so many times before. Cuckoo’s Nest, by contrast, is more of a challenge. Of course, we’ve all heard countless times about how the mentally ill were mistreated in the days before their ailments were understood to be what they were, but the subtle dynamics of power between Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) and McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) are a different kind of battle, and one uniquely suited to the film’s setting.

What really got me about the movie, though, was its understanding of the cinematic imperative of change in its characters. It is a commonplace of the creation of stories that your characters must change over the course of whatever story you are telling: that audiences will never care about a character who stays static over the course of a movie. (On a side note, this was the great sin of The Fighter, David O. Russell’s boxing flick released last year: Mark Wahlberg’s was the only character who had no noticeable character change from beginning to end.) Usually, this takes the form of a character struggling with some concept or skill, not being able to overcome, going through the various obstacles presented to him or her, and then finally breaking through in an ‘aha!’ moment in the climax. You know the sort: Luke Skywalker using the Force to guide his missiles down the shaft in Star Wars is an obvious example, as is Batman’s newfound resolution to become ‘whatever Gotham needs me to be’ at the end of The Dark Knight. For a less modern example, look no further than The Grapes of Wrath, which I wrote about a couple of months ago. In that movie, Tom Joad’s change comes when he breaks through and – basically – becomes a communist.

I don’t want to give too much away about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but it’s probably the first movie I’ve ever seen with a more realistic and honest understanding of change. For one, it rejects the idea of change that these other films represent – what we may term an ‘serpentine’ view of change, because it has characters who have had enough happen shedding their previous selves in the way a snake might shed its skin. There is a moment, in Cuckoo’s Nest, where it appears that this will happen – and then we find that the weight of history is too much, that change is not so easy. That moment is depressing, but also remarkably true. Moments and events can affect the lives of characters, just as they can affect us; but moments must be reinforced and cultivated and nurtured to truly change who a person or character is.

That kind of change – a truer vision of change, I would argue – forms an integral part of the story of another character in Cuckoo’s Nest, and culminates in a scene that somehow accomplishes the near-impossible task of being triumphant at the same moment that it is impossibly sad.

Intellectually, then, this treatment of change is impressive and rarely seen, a major accomplishment by Forman. But the more important fact is this: that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a genuinely moving film, and there are very few of those.

An Unexpected Feeling

Or, The AFI List Project #23: The Grapes of Wrath

It is a mystery to me how The Grapes of Wrath could have ended up in the top 25 of any list purporting to be a comprehensive survey of great films (unless, perhaps, the title of that list was ‘Blatantly Political Movies About Hicks Driving Around in Jalopies’). From technical and aesthetic points of view, I can find almost nothing to recommend it. The cinematography is unremarkable, the direction interminably slow, and the writing appalling; the first half of the film consists almost entirely of shots of the Joad car crawling across the landscape and of highway route signs, and its communist sympathies are not just unmistakable but also aggressive. Impassioned performances from Henry Fonda and eventual Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner Jane Darwell were the lone highlights. Frankly, the movie is boring. I spent the first hour-and-a-half (in other words, three quarters of the total running time) alternating between trying to figure out why I was supposed to like it and wanting it to come a merciful, long-overdue end.

And yet… And yet… there was something…

Well, anyway, before we get to that, let me offer a brief summary of the film so that people at least have some idea of what I’m talking about. As readers of the Steinbeck novel upon which it is based will know, The Grapes of Wrath tells the story of the hard-pressed Joad family after they are forced to leave their tenant farm in the Dust Bowl and travel west in search of work. Henry Fonda plays the youthful Tom Joad, who gets out of prison just in time to join his family on their trip to California. The trip is a veritable Oregon Trail, including the deaths of family members, transportation troubles, and moral conundrums about whether or not to feed starving children. Once they get to California, however, they find that their troubles have only just begun, as they are confronted with low wages, strike-breaking businessmen, and hostile locals who want nothing so much as the disappearance of all the ‘Oakies’ who have suddenly emerged from the east.

In its entirety, the movie is more or less a dissertation on why capitalism is bad, starting from the opening displacement of the Joads (accompanied by a heartfelt monologue by one character about how the land they lived on was theirs by dint of having lived on it, worked on it, and died on it) and culminating in their arrival at what it is for all intents and purposes a communist fairyland in California (which in the end they are also forced to leave). Along the way, a former companion is made into a sort of proletarian martyr, and Tom eventually decides to follow his lead and become the prophet of his message.

I was, surprisingly, not disturbed too much by the all-too-obvious politics of the film, despite the fact that political art of any variety is one of the few things that gets me foaming at the mouth. Perhaps my relative indifference arose from how blatant those politics were; perhaps it came about because for most of the movie I was so disinterested in it anyway. What did it matter to me if the Joads thought they should become communists?

And then, around when the Joad jalopy pulled into that communist fairyland that would represent their all-too-brief respite from the difficulties that had haunted them from the time of Tom’s initial return to his ancestral home, something bizarre and altogether unexpected happened. All of a sudden, I became aware that I inexplicably wanted the Joads to pull through all right. I wanted Tom to escape justice and realize himself; I wanted Ma and Pa Joad to endure; I wanted Rose of Sharon to have her baby and learn to be happy again. I discovered, in other words, that over the course of the first three-quarters of the movie I had come to care about the characters, despite how different they were from me, despite the shameless politicking that the film represented.

Might this be representative of one of the most important characteristics of film as an art form? There are, after all, reasons beyond competence that artists choose different mediums, and what a film is capable of is different from what a novel or a poem or a painting is capable of. Like photography, film is fundamentally observational: it suggests that we look directly at something that is really happening in the moment. At the same time, it is, like a novel, a narrative form; it is meant, most of the time, to tell a story. Film teaches us to like characters, to feel compassion for them, in much the same way that we often make friends in real life: by getting to know them. It did not have to be the Joads that were at the center of The Grapes of Wrath. It might have been any such dispossessed Dust Bowl family. Like in real life, we find them to some degree randomly; that they are the ones we come to care for is neither preordained nor necessary, simply a fact. They are the ones that we come to know, and in their trials and tribulations we are able to see also (we hope) some representation of the truth of our own lives.

This shows up, incidentally, one of the main problems of The Grapes of Wrath, which is its facile and mildly offensive resort to politics as the grand revelation that Tom experiences at the end of the film. There is something beneath the politics, however – a somewhat more human resolution that has to do with suffering and endurance. I don’t think that that makes The Grapes of Wrath a great movie, but it does allow it to transcend its more obvious shortcomings.

As I look at that, one other point comes to mind, which is that this is one of the few films that really showcases the importance of acting in creating successful films. I don’t say that to take away from other great performances: there are plenty of movies that rely on virtuoso performances to carry the weight of the movie. Can you imagine what There Will Be Blood would have been without Daniel Day-Lewis, for instance? The difference is that even such movies often have much more going on than those individual performances. There Will Be Blood, for instance, is also a virtuosic piece of directing; similarly, Lawrence of Arabia would have been significantly diminished without Peter O’Toole in the title role, but the story is still epic, and the cinematography makes the desert itself a separate and vital personality. There are none of those things in The Grapes of Wrath, just Fonda and Darwell seemingly becoming the people that they are to represent. They are what make the movie watchable. In believing that they are who they play, the suffering that the characters endure, which would otherwise have been so trite and so exaggerated, becomes real. Only when it is real can we, the audience, be induced to care.

All that being said, The Grapes of Wrath did not make me into a communist, so maybe it failed on that level. And I will maintain that, in the end, it’s not much of a film, interesting only for academic reasons. But it did remind me of something very important, very valuable, about why I love the movies, and for that at least it was worth the watch.