(Minor spoiler alert.)

As I read the film, there seemed to be two major driving forces in the film: one was the question of how you know what is real and the other is the need for redemption.

I thought the latter played out in interesting ways, as the group chose to use a strained relationship as the wedge for implanting a new idea in a subject’s mind. The goal was to get the subject to do something, and it was determined that the positive emotion of redemption would create a more powerful and enduring response than the negative emotions of anger and spite.

In part, this was clearly tied to the particular issues the main character had with his now dead wife, but it was also an interesting, if somewhat overly optimistic take on the power of emotions more generally.

The question of how you know what is real seemed to have its own two-pronged issue. On the one hand, there is the power of “idea”–one of the most unstoppable entities at work in the world. Once it takes root, it controls. Ideas shape our perception of reality, and they therefore shape our reality itself.

The other prong is that this power that ideas have to form our reality can, at times, destroy the life we actually have. Or, alternatively, it can create a life that is good and worth living.

My take on the mysterious ending, and the questions it left hanging, was that the reality in which Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) finds himself in the end is a reality worth living in, a resolved reality with redemption and resolution–even if it is not the waking world.

Overall, I was impressed with how the movie handled the themes of guilt and redemption, the power of ideas and challenges to our perceptions of reality. And I’m looking forward to watching it again as soon as possible.

It is a story of redemption, of deliverance–a story in which Jack Nicholson’s character, R. P. McMurphy, plays a leading role.

But what struck me in the film is that for all of McMurphy’s agitating, and for all this his own death is a a means of deliverance, it is (surprisingly) Billy Bibbit who is the Christ figure in the film.

We’re keyed into this on a couple of occasions when R. P. shoots a “Jesus Christ” exclamation his way. And his own death seems to be the self-giving that truly turns the tide on the ward.

So while R. P.’s own death is, in its way, redemptive, it seems that it’s redemptive as a following in the way of death that truly turned the story, the death of the would-be minor character Billy Bibbit.