Watching Ryan Murphy's latest creation, Ratched, I've noticed he likes twisted happy endings. It was the same with American Horror Story. No matter how macabre each season became, it ultimately came to a happy ending of sorts. Basically, he is a romantic at heart.
This should have made it difficult for him with the infamous Nurse Ratched, truly one of the cruelest, most heartless bitches conceived in a book or movie, but no bother. He finds a way to reach into her heart over 8 episodes, justifying her seemingly amoral behavior. Sarah Paulsen gives a bravuro performance as a younger Mildred, but nothing compared to the steely-eyed nurse in One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest, who never broke character for one moment. Hers was such a cruel role that no leading actress wanted to take it until Louise Fletcher came along. She was rewarded for her efforts with an Oscar.
Watching the series, Judy Davis was closer in character to the infamous nurse, until Murphy decided to reveal her warmer side. In the end, Nurse Bucket, as she is known, just wanted respect, which Mildred used to her advantage in getting out of the deep hole she had dug for herself at Lucia State Hospital. Too bad because I was really hoping to see sparks fly here, especially after the infamous water torture scene to cure Lily's lesbianism.
In the end, the monstrous scenes were only for effect, designed to make you wince or look away at some of the heinous treatments that were actually employed in sanitariums across the country at one time. Dr. Hanover seemed to revel in each and everyone of these new techniques, apparently the only doctor in a sanitarium full of nurses and tortured patients. He too seemed to be evil until Murphy revealed his soft spot, making us feel somewhat sorry for him when he met his tortured fate at the hands of Charlotte, wonderfully played in all her personalities by Sophie Okonedo.
His real interest in this series and his previous Hollywood is to show what gays and lesbians experienced in America before Stonewall. He shows just how torturous these relationships could be in darlings Lily and Ingrid, which he ultimately rescued from the evil clutches of Nurse Bucket. This taboo relationship also played out prominently between Nurse Ratched and Gwendolyn Biggs, the governor's press secretary as played by Cynthia Nixon.
Despite all the plot twists, and there's a real doozy at the end, the show was a little too predictable, in part because Murphy plans more for Nurse Ratched in seasons to come. Leave it to Charlotte to engage a new personality to spring Edmund Tulleson from the nut house, whose fate seemed so pre-determined. You figured something like this would happen, albeit not in so spectacular a fashion, giving something to look forward to next season.
Tulleson really didn't fit into the show, other than to provide a lurid background to Mildred's life among foster families, where she met Edmund. Probably the best scene in this regard was when she went with Gwendolyn to a puppet theater, and we watched her childhood played out among dolls. Edmund himself wasn't particularly interesting, upstaged by the young assistant Dolly, before and after the two flew the coop the first time around.
There are many memorable scenes and he lavishes the series in glorious costumes and colors that hint more at Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo than Miloš Forman's One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest. Just the same, it is fun to watch, largely thanks to the stand-out performances by Paulsen, Davis, Nixon, Okonedo and Sharon Stone, as a rich eccentric determined to get the head of Dr. Hanover. It's just too bad Murphy used Nurse Ratched as his prop. I think much more could have been done with a character such as this.
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