One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

There's so much to say about this Oscar-sweeping early showcase of future stars (Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, Brad Dourif, et al), but, because it has probably already been said, I'll just be satisfied with recommending that you frame "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by looking at its context. Made in 1975 and set in 1963 (right after Ken Kesey's book came out), the story is not only sympathetic to victims of the old psychiatric institution, but is part of a larger framework of people bucking against the system. Jack Nicholson's McMurphy is no revolutionary--in fact, he's really just a conscientious ne'er-do-well--but he sees through the unfairness of the system, as embodied by the stuffy, obstinate Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher, unfortunately in her largest role to date), and refuses to be a sheep. It's in the triumph-of-the-human-spirit vein, but Milos Forman treats it just right; it ends on a hopeful note and never gets sappy or bombastic. It's a great film from a great time for films.

I'm Not There

In one of the key scenes of "I'm Not There," one of the five quasi-Bob Dylans (the primary one, Cate Blanchett) ducks the queries of a British reporter (Bruce Greenwood) with layers upon layers of bullshit. Unfortunately, that's the closest you get to him--by being so adamant about not being pigeon-holed, he becomes a flat character and, though Dylan is not exonerated for behaving so arrogantly, the reporter is penalized for asking straightforward questions. Even if this jives with the real Dylan's behavior (as I'm told is shown in the 1966 D.A. Pennebaker documentary, "Don't Look Back"), it's incredibly unsatisfying, especially in a fiction film. It's a shame, too, because there's a lot commendable in this movie. The director, Todd Haynes, successfully combines three strands of the folk singer--and two abstracts: Heath Ledger as an actor who played a singer like Dylan and Richard Gere as Billy the Kid--without leaving the audience confused.

The Blanchett part, the heart of the movie, is particularly good. She's great in an off-hand, here-for-the-ride type way and David Cross makes a brilliantly absurd Ginsberg; even the goofiness--stylistic cues and references to "A Hard Day's Night," "Masculin Féminin" and "8 1/2"--works as a kind of wacky pastiche of Swinging London. Some of it, however, is terribly blah: Heath Ledger's divorce melodrama does not only seem to not pertain to Dylan, it seems like it belongs to a lamer movie. (One scene, where he turns chauvinist-pig and hippie sell-out, however, is right on.) But the movie throws in heavy-handed symbols (like Billy the Kid seeing footage of L.B.J. and Nam flash across the Old West landscape) which wouldn't work even if they weren't counter to the movie's resistance to paint a fuller picture of Dylan. It's a smart, proficient and stylish movie, but it wants to answer questions and then refuses to. To be fair, I can't count myself as anything more than a casual fan of the musician, but even if "I'm Not There" (a fitting title) reflects his real attitudes, it seems like a cheat. Dylan obviously means to say something in his music; if he denies that, he's got more problems than this movie suggests.

The Birds

Because I used to dismiss "The Birds" as simply Hitchcock at his hokiest, I was surprised how much I liked the film when I rewatched it recently. The love story is both lame and ridiculous; Rod Taylor is a lawyer and Melanie (Tippi Hendren) is a spoiled heiress and a prankster--but really they're both squares. Of course, Taylor's mother, Lydia (Jessica Tandy), is a salty old widow who distrusts his suitors and fears abandonment. And we're given an erstwhile lover of Taylor's who has relocated herself to Bodega Bay--the Northern California town that becomes the birds' prey--even though she and the attorney are now "just friends." Worst of all, Taylor's eleven-year-old sister (who begs the question, how old is Taylor supposed to be?) is terribly precocious and disturbingly fond of Melanie. This soggy subplot is either hackneyed soap opera or a stroke of genius: the random onslaught of the aviary exposes how trite these unbelievable stock characters are. One character mentions Oedipus in reference to Taylor's relationship with his mother; later on, Lydia finds a victim of a bird attack whose eyes have been pecked out.

Usually Hitchcock's famous "maguffin" was negligible (i.e. nuclear plans in "Notorious," stolen information in "North by Northwest") and the romance was at the heart of the flick; here, it's the other way around. However, given the amount of screen time devoted to the boy-meets-girl story and the fact that a few scenes--particularly a monologue given by Tandy in bed--are particularly well-acted, it's hard to believe that a big part of Hitchcock did not buy into the old movie treacle. Regardless, there's some brilliant Soviet-style editing and Hitchcock's decision to not have any music on the soundtrack--in lieu of electronic bird noises--is quite effectively chilly, despite the fact that he sacrificed what could have been another great Bernard Herrmann score in order to attain it. Plus, aside from the silly, irrational plot (both the birds and the melodrama) there are some explicitly funny scenes, such as an exchange between a miserly old ornithologist and a casual harbinger of the apocalypse at a café. (This may lead some to read a green, anti-industrialization message into the movie, but I think it's wiser to see it as Biblical hokum meant to ratchet up the confusion and terror.) In many ways, this movie is a precursor to "Jaws," which was still twelve years away.