One Flew Over Cuckoo's Nest
This movie is my worst fear that came true. I have worked in psychiatric hospitals and I have sseen patients in miserable mental condition. This movie shows the flawed healthcare system of the 90's and how psychiatric patients were treated back then. I don't know how much of it was actually true but from the creative point of view, it is a timeless classic.
There is a lot of memorable scenes and dialogues and characters in this movie, but the one that impacted me the most was Nurse Ratched. She is undoubtedly the scariest villain I have ever seen in a movie, including Buffalo Bill and Hannibal the cannibal of the Silence of the lambs.
See, there's a difference between Nurse Ratched and the two psychopaths of the silence of the lambs. There are three types of people in the world: Mentally healthy, mentally ill and mentally rotten. Buffalo Bill and Hannibal fall under the category of mentally ill. They did what they did becuase of the illness of their mind, it was not in their control. But people like nurse Ratched are mentally rotten. They know what they are doing, they know it very well, too well.
Nurse Ratched is not just a nurse, her character in the film represents the whole system of the time. Nurse Ratched is an institution that wants to keep her patients crazy so her system would not go out of business. She is the system that does not treat mental patients as human beings. She is the system that manipulates these ill minds to the point to kill themselves.
What can I say about Randie played by the great Jack Nicholson! There isn't anything about him and his performance in this movie that hasn't been said already.
What I'll always remember about this movie is nurse Ratched's stonecold look and the last scene when Chief puts a pillow on Randie's face out of sheer love. I understood the concept of surprising inevitability in this scene. That's the only time someone killed the person they loved and it was justified, even I, as the audience member, know that it was the best possible favour Chief or any sane person could do to his buddy in that situation.
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