On Screen

...The film is less powerful than the novel because of this inversion, not because of any incompatibility between the two mediums...

...Consistent with his nonmusical conception, Bergman presents his characters in close-up...

...In any case, two hours of close-ups does not make for a particularly exciting film...

...Pamina is shrill and unlovely...

...In both the book and the film, McMurphy dies after having been literally shocked into mindlessness by the hospital...

...Like Thoreau, the novel argues that the only way to see a mad society clearly is from a vantage point the society itself defines as outside—the prison or the insane asylum...

...So the audience is asked by Shi-kaneder's libretto to make a moral switch...

...And although the Queen is wicked, she has magic that is beautiful and good: It is she who gives Tamino the magic flute that charms the savage beasts and Monastotos' wicked band, and provides the three guides (traditionally played by cherubic boys) who help Tamino out of various troubles through the wisdom of their innocence...

...Yet we soon learn that the Queen is the evil one, that Pamina has been abducted for her own good, that Sarastro is her guardian and the deputy for her dead father, and that while her virtue and safety are in fact threatened, the villain is not Sarastro but his raunchy henchman, Monastotos...

...Nevertheless, most of the music is so glorious that nothing else matters, and since, as in any opera, the drama is primarily in the music, only the broader issues of the plot have any weight...

...As a result of his dubious quest, Bergman has sacrificed much of the music, and therefore much of the drama...

...the second half of the opera concerns the trials Tamino is subjected to on his way to membership and to Pamina's hand in marriage...

...People normally feel sad or happy or angry in specific contexts, about specific objects and events...

...Moreover, we never learn why she is bad —she merely seems a little daffy...

...Sarastro, we also discover, is the head of a mystic brotherhood (Mozart was a Freemason...

...Unfortunately—perhaps because the role was played by Shi-kaneder himself in the original production—Papageno and his cloying glockenspiel occupy a central place in the musical action...

...Nicholson may be a virtuoso, yet even virtuosos have limitations, and his confine him to playing seedy characters...

...Musically the opera is marred for me by the cuteness of its subplot, too...

...In a publicity release he tells us that he looked for singers whose voices sounded natural...

...But in opera the aria is expressive, not the facial gestures required to sing it, and the distance that the theater provides between audience and stage is more appropriate to musical action...

...Kesey's Randall Mc-Murphy was the clear-eyed hero who discerned society's violence, its fear of love and life, its inhumanity that masquerades as sanity...

...It is not especially difficult to achieve a successful transmutation from the literary to the cinematic...

...Not that the movie is without virtues...

...Our allegiances are with Tamino, the Queen and the captive Pamina...

...Novels present filmmakers with no such systematic problems...

...Bad operas, and bad productions of good operas, blur the difference...

...the interruptions to the music are usually just that...

...Of the male leads, the less important Papageno wins most of our attention...

...Similarly, a viewer who comes to Bergman's version after a long acquaintance with his other films may feel a peculiar poignancy...

...music embodies the rhythm of hope or fear or longing, not the content...

...It's a case not of bad acting but of directorial misconceptions...

...You can find artificially cultivated voices that sound marvelous," he writes, "but you can never really believe that a human personality is doing the singing...

...Most of Bergman's movies have been about people who were afraid to accept the trials they were offered, about lovers who could not love, about an enfeebling of the capacity for joy...

...Through the intervention of the Queen of the Night, Tamino is saved and bidden to rescue the Queen's daughter, Pamina, who is in the clutches of the evil sorcerer Sarastro...

...As Jack Nicholson plays him, he is very ordinary if charming, not too bright, a person whose heroism more often seems like reckless self-destructiveness...

...Instead of a flute, Papageno is given a magic glockenspiel, and songs by Mozart that strain at comedy...

...Opera is widely loathed by people who care about either music or theater, and if they tolerate it at all, they are apt to say it should have begun and ended with Mozart...

...But in the novel the wings are really McMurphy's, and therefore the book ends on an upbeat...

...In Bergman's version, Sarastro is made to be Pamina's father, giving the whole dispute the tawdry air of a divorce squabble...

...Still, it is not difficult to put opera lovers on the defensive: The stories are generally silly, and in a sense always besides the point...

...Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a pretty good novel...

...When he sees her picture, Tamino instantly falls in love...

...his Indian friend, Chief Bromden, meanwhile, manages to escape...

...Its most interesting, if inadvertent, accomplishment may be to make us ask ourselves what these two forms are about...

...The Magic Flute is no exception...

...But it is a bad performance of Mozart's masterpiece, and a fairly boring movie...

...Bergman is particularly good at dramatizing Mozart's interest in the love between men and women, from the cheerful carnality of Papageno and Papagena to Ta-mino and Pamina's passionate chastity...

...As the opera begins, its hero Ta-mino runs on stage, pursued by a serpent...

...A comparable success from the operatic medium requires arcane and alchemical talents...

...The greatest tribute one can pay to the film is that despite the profound injustice to the opera, Bergman clearly loves it, and in conveying that love, he captures some of Mozart's magic...

...Whereas Tamino is the prince whose aristocratic virtues will allow him to penetrate the secrets of the brotherhood, Papageno is the natural man, a rustic who can't keep secrets and who has no wish to be tried by fire or anything else...

...There is some charming play between Papageno and Papagena in which they exuberantly disrobe each other (the finale appropriately envisions them surrounded by small Papagenos and Papagenas...

...The romance between Tamino and Pamina has a parallel in that between Papageno and Papagena...

...There is no soaring spirit here...

...Bergman has gone in the other direction, toward theater and specificity of character...

...The Magic Flute, like Smiles of a Summer Night, is the comic vision that the modern world, as Bergman sees it, has failed to fulfill...

...But since Sarastro is said to be all-knowing, we don't understand why he has allowed Monastotos to lurk lecherously around Pamina...

...McMurphy himself, however, was hard to place,- and the movie makes this harder...

...In the novel he was spiritually large, a redeemer who cared more about making men of his fellow inmates than about himself...

...His Queen of the Night sounds like Florence Foster Jenkins...

...Indeed, the human voice as an instrument of musical feeling and action is one of the things that opera as a genre is about...

...And the Queen's three handmaidens, who have some of the opera's most graceful ensemble singing, are buxom and delicious...

...Because Nicholson's McMurphy is a small man, the movie leaves us with a demoralizing sense of defeat...

...Sometimes they have also been about the risks, the loneliness and the fakery of magic, or art...

...If the form is problematic, the reason is that music and people are expressive in different ways...

...The cuckoo's nest of the title is a mental hospital, and the theme of the book was one dear to the '60s—the craziness of "normal" America...

...Flute was performed for the first time just a few weeks before Mozart's death has endowed its references to rites of passage with a darker significance than they might otherwise have...

...he fact that The Magic Milos Forman's film version is a pretty good movie, albeit less successful than the novel...

...In Mozart's opera, by contrast, love is achieved, and art is life's supreme accomplishment...

...They're missing something...

...Wagner's solution to this problem was to make his drama and his characters as unquotidian and abstract as music itself...