Release Year: 2005 Rating: R Duration: 102 minutes Director: John Maybury Producer: George Clooney, Peter Guber, Steven Soderbergh Distributor: Warner Independent Pictures
A military veteran returns to his native Vermont suffering from bouts of amnesia. When he is accused of murder and lands in an asylum, a well-meaning doctor puts him on a heavy course of experimental drugs, restrains him in a jacket-like device, and locks him away in a body drawer of the basement morgue. The process sends him on a journey into the future, where he can foresee his death (but not who did it or how) in four days' time. Now the only question that matters is: can the woman he meets in the future save him?
Anatole Litvak gave film buffs the template for life in an institution for the mentally ill with his 1948 film "The Snake Pit." This was one of the first films to deal intelligently with mental breakdowns and the slow recovery process. Along came Milos Forman twenty-seven years later with a more powerful story, one which started the now-fashionable view that the inmates of an asylum are more sane than their professional keepers. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" featured Ken Kesey's story about a feisty misfit who enters the wards and inspires his low- self-esteem patients to assert themselves. Things didn't turn out to well for him.
