Credits: Robin Williams, Daniel London, Monica Potter, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bob Gunton, Josef Sommer, Irma P. Hall, Frances, James Greene, Michael Jeter, Harold Gould, Richard Kiley.
Screenplay by Steve Oedekerk, based on the book "Gesundheit: Good Health is a Laughing Matter" by Hunter Doherty Adams and Maureen Mylander.
Directed by Tom Shadyac.
110 minutes, PG-13, 1998
"Patch Adams" made me want to spray the screen with Lysol. This movie is shameless. It's not merely a tearjerker. It extracts tears individually by liposuction, without anesthesia. It is allegedly based on the life of a real man named Patch Adams, who I have seen on television, where he looks like Salvador Dali's seedy kid brother. If all of these things really happened to him, they should have abandoned Robin Williams and brought in Jerry Lewis for the telethon.
As the movie opens, a suicidal Patch has checked into a mental hospital. There he finds that the doctors don't help him, but the patients do. On the outside, he determines to become a doctor in order to help people and enrolls in medical school. Soon he finds, not to our amazement, that medicine is an impersonal business. When a patient is referred to by bed number or disease, Patch reasonably asks, "What's her name?" Patch is a character. To himself, he's an irrepressible bundle of joy, a zany live wire who brings laughter into the lives of the sick and dying. To me, he's a pain in the wazoo. If this guy broke into my hospital room and started tap-dancing with bedpans on his feet, I'd call the cops. The lesson of "Patch Adams" is that laughter is the best medicine. I know Norman Cousins cured himself by watching Marx Brothers movies, but to paraphrase Groucho, I enjoy a good cigar, but not when it explodes. I've been lucky enough to discover doctors who never once found it necessary to treat me while wearing a red rubber nose.
In the movie, Patch plays the clown to cheer up little tykes whose hair has fallen out from chemotherapy. Put in charge of the school welcoming committee for a gynecologists' convention, he builds a papier-mache prop: enormous spread legs reaching an apex at a lecture hall entrance. What a card. He's the nonconformist, humanist, warm-hearted rebel who defies the cold and materialist establishment and stands up for clowns and free spirits everywhere. This is a role Robin Williams was born to play. In fact, he was born playing it.
We can see at the beginning where the movie is headed, but we think maybe can jump free before the crash. No luck. (Spoiler warning!) Consider, for example, the character named Carin (Monica Potter), who is one of Patch's fellow students. She appears too late in the movie to be a major love interest. Yet Patch does love her. Therefore, she's obviously in the movie for one purpose only: to die. The only suspense involves her function in the movie's structure, which is inspired by those outlines that Hollywood writing coaches flog to their students: Will her death provide the False Crisis, or the Real Crisis? She's good only for the False Crisis, which I will not reveal, except to say that it is cruel and arbitrary, stuck in merely to get a cheap effect. It inspires broodings of worthlessness in Patch, who ponders suicide again, but sees a butterfly and pulls himself together for the False Dawn. Life must go on, and he must continue his mission to save patients from their depression. They may die, but they'll die laughing.
The False Dawn (the upbeat before the final downbeat) is a lulu. A dying woman refuses to eat. Patch persuades her to take nourishment by filling a plastic wading pool with spaghetti and jumping around in it. This is the perfect approach, and soon the wretched woman is gobbling her pasta. I would have asked for some from the part he hadn't stepped in.
Next comes the Real Crisis. Patch is threatened with expulsion from medical school. I rubbed my eyes with incredulity: There is a courtroom scene! Courtrooms are expected in legal movies. But in medical tearjerkers, they're the treatment of last resort. Any screenwriter who uses a courtroom scene in a non-legal movie is not only desperate for a third act, but didn't have a second act that led anywhere.
What a courtroom. It's like a John Grisham fantasy. This could be the set for "Inherit the Wind." The main floor and balcony are jammed with Patch's supporters, with a few seats up front for the villains. There's no legalistic mumbo-jumbo; these people function simply as an audience for Patch's narcissistic grandstanding. (Spoiler warning No. 2:) After his big speech, the courtroom doors open up, and who walks in? All those bald little chemotherapy kids Patch cheered up earlier. And yes, dear reader, each and every one is wearing a red rubber nose. Should these kids be out of bed? Their immune systems are shot to hell. If one catches cold and dies, there won't be any laughing during the malpractice suit.
I have nothing against sentiment, but it must be earned. Cynics scoffed at Robin Williams' previous film, "What Dreams May Come," in which he went to heaven and then descended into hell to save the woman he loved. Corny? You bet--but with the courage of its convictions. It made no apologies and exploited no formulas. It was the real thing. "Patch Adams" is quackery.
In "Patch Adams," Robin Williams plays a medical maverick who finds no situation too grim for a guffaw. He develops the theory that the best way to treat a dying patient who wants one last safari is to shock the man out of a sound sleep with balloon animals, for example. Naturally, the establishment is slow to appreciate Patch, to the point where he winds up making a heartfelt courtroom-style speech in defense of his methods. Here's a film for anyone who'd like to hear Mr. Williams declaim, "If we're going to fight a disease, let's fight one of the most terrible diseases of all: indifference!"
Choosing another of the soggier roles he has lately favored, Mr. Williams spends a lot of time here smiling gratefully at the compliments heaped on him ("God, Patch, it's amazing what you've done with this place, you know?") and looking significantly older than the medical student he initially plays. To save the material from utter oblivion, he also does his share of clowning, though it bears the stamp of the creative team (the director, Tom Shadyac, and the writer, Steve Oedekerk) behind some Jim Carrey films. The whiff of "Ace Ventura" extends to proctologist jokes, gynecologist jokes (including a big, bawdy sight gag) and masturbation jokes.
Low humor might count for more here if it weren't constantly overshadowed by the film's maudlin streak. Mr. Williams, in a film based on a true story, plays a man whose own period of mental illness helps him empathize with patients and makes him vow to bring more laughs to their hospital experience.
Dedicated to the point of wearing a bedpan on his head and an enema bulb on his nose, he keeps the nurses collapsing in grateful laughter and the patients charmed, while also courting a beautiful fellow student (Monica Potter) with a dark-eyed, nostrilly resemblance to Julia Roberts.
"People are good?" he rails when life turns brutally tough. "Trust people? Hah!" But you can bet that the film's Patch will not let his kindness waver for long.
Eventually he founds the Gesundheit Institute, billed here as "the first fun hospital in the world" and presumably the reason why playing Patch struck Mr. Williams as a good idea. But the role, like Marc Shaiman's noxious soundtrack, is too full of prefabricated sentiments to let an actor breathe.
"Patch Adams," which begins in 1969 and has a notably perfunctory period look, also features Philip Seymour Hoffman as the roommate too starchy to appreciate Patch, and Peter Coyote as one of the many desperately ill people who succumb to Patch's charms. (Mr. Williams arrives at his bedside amusingly dressed as an angel, calling this a "preview of coming attractions.") Also here is the year's least welcome technological advance, the computer-generated butterfly meant to provide a touch of magic for a film that has none of its own.
The most annoying of several cloying holiday films, ''Patch Adams'' takes the true story of a '70s medical student who defied school authorities with his humorous, personal approach to patient care, and twists it into yet another platform for Robin Williams to ham it up. The human Care Bear chucks all the restraint he displayed in ''Good Will Hunting'' and returns to his tired shtick, careening between manic cornball gags and mawkish sentimentality. The whole thing plays like a really long Robin Williams' talk show appearance with a plot slapped on.
Williams plays Hunter ''Patch'' Adams, a real-life doctor who currently operates a highly unorthodox clinic in West Virginia. His interest in medicine began in 1969, when he became suicidal and committed himself to a mental hospital, only to discover that his contacts with fellow patients were more therapeutic than sessions with his doctors. Adams decided to become a physician himself and entered medical school, where he annoyed the hell out of the medical establishment by blurring the doctor/patient line with his heartfelt, Catskills comic approach to the sick and suffering.
Adams' real-life story, documented in the 1993 book ''Gesundheit: Good Health is a Laughing Matter,'' is fascinating, but the film version is simply painful, turning mainstream doctors into cardboard villains and allowing Williams 110 minutes of insufferable self- indulgence. Robin Williams deserved his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for ''Good Will Hunting.'' His performance was tight, controlled and compelling; everything that is absent here. Williams is the sort of performer who requires a director to reign him in, protecting the actor from his own worst tendencies. In ''Patch Adams,'' he simply runs amok.
The film pits Adams against paper tigers, presenting traditional doctors as anal-retentive, self-righteous prigs. I found the blanket portrayal offensive, an insult to the many dedicated, overworked men and women who tirelessly devote themselves to quality patient care, often at the expense of their own well-being. If you believe this film, Patch was a red-nosed missionary, a medical superhero single- handedly fighting arrogant, uncaring pill-dispensers in the name of truth, justice and the Borscht-belt way. I didn't buy it for a second.
Adams' chief nemesis is Dean Walcott (Bob Gunton), a character with absolutely no depth or humanity, given to statements like ''we will rigorously and ruthlessly train the humanity out of you and turn you into something better.'' He fumes nonstop at Adams, raging over the Patch's attempts to ''bring us down to their level.'' Continuing the stereotyping, the film presents all nurses as uniformly sympathetic, twinkling angels beaten into submission by the evil doctors and all too happy to assist Patch in his whoopee-cushion quest. What a load of crap.
The film engages in non-stop emotional manipulation, stretching situations to ridiculous lengths to make Patch Adams a comic martyr. Watch Patch restore an elderly woman's will to live by plopping her into a vat of noodles! See Adams break the shell of a hateful cancer patient, bonding with him so completely that the man shoos his wife and children away from his deathbed, so he can spend his last moments on Earth with Patch! Gaze in amazement as the filmmakers wrap up the movie with a hearing in front of a medical board, allowing Williams one more opportunity to deliver a maudlin speech.
Or better yet, don't. Avoid this parade of clich�d schmaltz and read the book instead. It has to contain more truth than this syrupy disaster. At one point, a fellow student turns to Patch Adams and says ''God, you're being so self-indulgent!'' If only the director could have had the courage to say the same thing to Robin Williams.
In a role that seems as if it were written specifically for him, Robin Williams pretty much hits all of the right notes in "Patch Adams." Based on the true-life story of a medical student (and later a doctor) who blended humor, compassion and modern medicine into a healing concoction that reportedly helped his patients more than traditional medicine alone, the film may get sappy at times and come off as over-sentimentalized at others, but for the most part it's an engaging, funny and touching story.
Williams has nearly always displayed his combination of zany, highly energetic wit and compassion through the characters he's played over the years. From his role in TV's "Mork and Mindy" to his performances in funny and touching films such as "Good Morning Vietnam" and "Good Will Hunting" (for which he finally received an Oscar victory after several previous nominations), Williams has long been a crowd favorite exactly for those thespian abilities. This film will only further cement his status as the caring and compassionate class clown.
Not being familiar with the historical details of the real Patch Adams, it's unclear just how much artistic liberty and license director Tom Shadyac ("Ace Ventura: Pet Detective," "The Nutty Professor) and writer Steve Oedekerk ("Ace Ventura 2: When Nature Calls," "Nothing To Lose") have taken with the source material.
Nonetheless, they have supplied Williams with more than ample amounts of funny material, much of which is presumably improved upon, if not wholly generated by the whirlwind comic himself. During the film's two hour runtime, we get to see Williams clowning around with patients, extemporaneously addressing a meat packers convention, and generally behaving in a manner (silly faces, walking, costumes, etc...) that would have resulted in his character being sent off to a mental asylum if he hadn't already previously committed himself.
The results are often quite funny, especially if you like Williams seemingly (and probably real) impromptu bits and performances, and there are plenty of laughs to keep the audience in stitches throughout (pun intended). There are also plenty of heartfelt moments, and that's where the film nearly loses its balance several times.
While they're always of the crowd pleasing variety (ie. A tear to your eye, a lump in your throat, but a smile on your face), a few of the sentimental moments -- if viewed out of context of the emotionally laden material in which they appear -- nearly seem mawkish in design and delivery. Even so, and at least upon the first viewing of the film, you can't help but be overcome by their intended effect. As such, they, and their nice blend with the film's humor, will make this picture a big audience favorite.
Of course Williams' presence doesn't hurt either. While he may go occasionally go just a bit overboard in either direction (exaggerated humor and eye glistening), his performance is as engaging as ever, and this film easily makes up for his misstep in "What Dreams May Come."
The supporting performances are all decent, but obviously fall into Williams' huge comedic shadow. Patch's nemesis, played by Bob Gunton ("Glory"), is appropriately menacing in a dramatic sense, but unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your view) never gets to show a human side behind his dehumanizing (for the good of medicine) efforts. One keeps waiting for that one standard-issue scene where he and Patch finally, but only partially connect, but it never arrives.
Supporting star standout Philip Seymour Hoffman ("Happiness," "Boogie Nights") delivers another topnotch performance as the serious roommate, while relative newcomers Monica Potter ("Without Limits") as Patch's would-be girlfriend, and Daniel London as his somewhat nerdy colleague, are also good.
With the notoriously bad reputation many doctors have for being uncaring or, at best, indifferent toward the person behind the malady they're treating, this film will strike a nerve among many moviegoers who've undoubtably been patients at some point in their lives. As such, Patch Adams the character, and the movie, find themselves in a no-lose situation.
The audience immediately sympathizes with Patch's quest to be more humane as well as his fight against those who don't agree with his tactics and philosophy. Unless you're a diehard cynic, you'll have no problem falling in behind, and loving Patch Adams the movie, and the character. Funny, moving, and best of all, highly entertaining despite its few flaws, the film should be a big hit. We give "Patch Adams" a 7.5 out of 10.
Affordable health care is a topic regularly discussed in this country by presidential candidates and members of Congress. Anyone who has ever filed a health insurance claim knows the frustration inherent in that process. The American medical profession has also come under fire for making quality care unaffordable to patients without insurance, and putting financial concerns above the desire to help people. Tom Shadyac's film Patch Adams is based on the true story of Dr. Hunter Doherty Adams, a physician who resisted these established trends of the industry and began a health care facility where humor is the primary medicine and free care is cheerfully available to those unable to pay.
Based on Adams's book Gesundheit: Good Health Is a Laughing Matter, the film recalls his experiences as a med student seeking the human touch in a world of stuffy professionals. Unfortunately, Steve Oedekerk's screen adaptation and the directing by Shadyac (Liar Liar, The Nutty Professor) both pander to the lowest common denominator of moviegoers. The film is formulaic from the word go, with so many trite, overused devices that it could serve as a primer for "things to avoid when making an original movie." Choosing Robin Williams for the title role was not exactly a bold move either, since we have seen him do this exact same performance in a half dozen other films, from Good Morning, Vietnam to Toys to Good Will Hunting to What Dreams May Come. This crowd-pleasing strategy may well be by choice, however, as the bulk of the film's proceeds will allegedly go toward the establishment of Adams's Gesundheit Institute, to be located somewhere in West Virginia.
After a bout with suicidal depression, Hunter Adams (Williams) checks himself into a mental institution. Noticing how indifferent the resident doctors are to his and his fellow inmates' conditions, he finds he can help others by seeing things from their sometimes skewed perspective. In teaching them to laugh at themselves, he teaches them to laugh. Having discovered this talent for helping people, he leaves the institution and enrolls in medical school, but the stuffy atmosphere and prohibitive rules turn him off � med students are not even allowed to see patients until they're in their third year.
So he simply circumvents those rules: He begins seeing patients wearing a meat packer's smock as a lab coat. With laughter as the best medicine, he brings about emotional (and sometimes physical) progress in some patients and soon becomes the most beloved "doctor" at the university hospital. His med school friends Truman (Daniel London) and Carin (Monica Potter) are dubious of his methods at first, but when they see the results, they come on board. The only one who is not amused is the surly Dean Walcott (Bob Gunton), who wants nothing more than to bring him down.
There is no doubt that Dr. Adams's cause is a noble one, but it's a shame that the film is not more believable, especially since it is based on his true story. The character of Patch is too perfect; everything comes easily to him. Everything he does is right and true; every misfortune that befalls him is an appalling injustice. And at each moment of emotional impact, we are treated to a huge music swell and a crane shot. The acting is not bad, but predictable plot elements and transparent emotional manipulations give the film a tone not unlike one of the later episodes of M*A*S*H. It's a great idea and a great cause, but from a critical standpoint, Patch Adams is not a great movie.
If actors won Oscars purely for their ability to produce raging rivers of tears on command, Robin Williams could start writing his acceptance speech for next year's ceremony right now. Between "What Dreams May Come" and "Patch Adams," he would have the prize locked up. Williams' routine goes something like this: First, there's a forlorn look, followed by the wrinkling of the eyes. Then his lips begin to tremble, like the ground around Yosemite moments before a geiser eruption. Finally -- boom! -- industrial-size drops of saline begin cascading down his cheeks, accompanied by cracking in his voice or a heavy wheeze. It's an act that can be used to good effect when Williams is working with a director such as Gus Van Sant ("Good Will Hunting"), who knows when to cut away from the waterworks. But "Patch"'s Tom Shadyac is not one to say no to his stars -- his previous films are the Eddie Murphy remake of "The Nutty Professor" and Jim Carrey's "Liar Liar" -- so "Patch" pauses every 20 minutes or so to allow Williams a chance to drain his tearducts. The movie opens with a warning that what we're about to see is a true story, perhaps because the filmmakers recognized Steve Oedekerk's script was so corny it might otherwise have been mistaken for something written 60 years ago and just recovered from the vault. Williams plays Hunter "Patch" Adams, who overcame clinical depression to become a physician dedicated to treating patients like people and using humor to ease pain and suffering. The real-life Adams (who looks more like Salvador Dali than Williams) is the author of the well-reviewed books "Gesundheit!" and "House Calls," and he's also considerably more fascinating than the film gives him credit for being. The screenplay is so intent on turning Adams into a modern-day saint it never offers any genuine insights into the man's background or psychological makeup, concentrating instead on his clashes with cardboard authority figures, such as a scheming dean (Bob Gunton) and institutional orderlies who are too quick to restrain and subdue. The brightest patches in "Patch" are those that have little to do with the basic story, such as a foray into a meat-packers' convention and a ridiculously elaborate prank played by Adams on a group of visiting gynecologists. Unfortunately, those moments come early in the film and are followed by such bitter pills as a grueling scene in which Adams weeps his way through a rendition of "Blue Skies" and a lengthy soliliquoy allowing Adams to berate God for being so inefficient and distant. "You rested on the seventh day," he bellows. "Maybe you should have spent that day on compassion!" "Patch Adams" will probably sway those viewers who sigh whenever they see that coffee commercial where "Peter" comes home unexpectedly and brightens everyone's Christmas, but this attempted tribute to the human spirit more often than not seems like it was written by a computer. All the cliched characters fall into place -- the frosty/friendly colleague (Monica Potter, doing her best Julia Roberts imitation), the uptight roommate (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the adorably kook (Michael Jeter; tummy, be still) -- and perform exactly as expected, while Williams does his best to moisturize everyone in his vacinity. The real Patch Adams could have told all concerned that laughter, not saccharin, is the best medicine, both for patients and for moviegoers.
After the fiasco of his last nightmarish concoction, Robin Williams� latest is a big step up the medical chain (he again plays a doctor). He gets to live in this one. And laugh. It�s a genuine, heartwarming crowd pleaser, although director Tom Shadyac can be seen disgorging heapings of sentimental claptrap over this biographical landscape, based on the true story of Hunter "Patch" Adams. Be warned, if you don�t catch yourself (you might not want to), you�ll end up with an oversized lump, possibly contagious, in your throat. Patch Adams is an extra large dose of heal thyself mixed with a clownish sense of humor, a drop of love potion, and a spoonful of sugar (it does make the medicine go down). Just right for the holidays and just what the doctor ordered -- for you, and possibly for Universal Pictures, drastically in search of a hit after dismal outings from Meet Joe Black, Babe: Pig in the City, and Psycho.
Williams, a versatile fellow who can fill a good role with compassion, intelligence, and wit (Good Will Hunting; Dead Poets Society; Awakenings; Good Morning, Vietnam), has also managed to lay an egg or three (What Dreams May Come, Jack, Being Human). Director Shadyac and writer Steve Oedekerk, who left a stamp on the comedy landscape with their Ace Ventura films and The Nutty Professor, are smart enough to let Williams fly with the material, loosely structured on a former mental patient turned unconventional medical school student. Out of 163 indifferent enrollees in his class at Virginia Medical University in the 1970s, Patch is the only one who (initially) doesn�t suck up the god-fearing disposition instilled by Dean Walcott (Bob Gunton) that doctors minimize their distance from their patients. Gunton, a Vietnam vet, imbues his anal-retentive character with a Pattonesque, colon-blocking authoritarianism ("Our job here is to ruthlessly drain the humanity out of you and make something better out of you�we�re going to make you doctors."), which also makes him an easy target for Patch�s barbed humor. Gunton, often pigeon-holed for similar roles throughout a lengthy career, still holds a renown place on my video mantel for his turn as pivotal nemesis Warden Norton in The Shawshank Redemption.
The film follows our suicidal lead from his 1969 self-committal in a North Virginia mental hospital, to a realization that his psychiatrist is an uncaring bore, and the understanding that his fellow patients, particularly roommate Rudy (Michael Jeter) and math wiz Arthur Mendelson (Harold Gould), offer a empathic glimpse of Patch�s unleashed potential, of seeing beyond the obvious.
Within two years he has found his calling, matriculating in med school, his bunk shared with stiff shirt Mitch the Bitch (Philip Seymour Hoffman of Boogie Nights and Happiness), heir to a physician�s lineage and annoyed by Patch�s flippant attitude and easy grades. Other students brought under Patch�s Svengali-like influence are the nerdy Truman (relative newcomer Daniel London) and Carin (Monica Potter, Nicholas Cage�s wife in Con Air and last seen in the yet-to-see-wide-release Without Limits), an ice queen sounding very much like Julia Roberts who eventually surrenders to Patch�s romantic notions and his non-conformist idea of creating a free clinic that uses humor to cure pain and suffering, of treating patients, not disease.
Also putting in admirable appearances are Harve Presnell (Fargo) as a sympathetic dean and Peter Coyote as an abusive, terminally ill patient who yields to Patch�s angelic charm. As good as the supporting cast is, they are wisely coached to stand in awe of the film�s quarterback. And like any hall of famer, Williams throws lots of hilarious completions, recovers lost fumbles, and does lots of public-service announcements. Williams� set pieces are many, including a convention crashing episode by which the loquacious Patch endears himself to hundreds of meat packers ("Shanks for the memories") in near- revivalist rapture.
His anti-establishment antics relocate to the children�s ward of the school�s hospital, where an enema bulb and bed pans provide an inspirational laughter and endorphin release for the patients and the audience. Another set-up, again strictly for comedy�s sake, is a wacky piece of set design welcoming a group of visiting gynecologists to campus. A ton of homilies and pontifications later, it�s showdown time for Patch with the authorities, with an ending sure to brighten your day and wet your hanky.
Patch Adams isn�t the best of the year-end batch (honors go to Shakespeare in Love and Waking Ned Devine), but you won�t go home feeling you�ve just had turkey.