# Patch Adams (1998)

### reviewed by
Serdar Yegulalp

    Patch Adams (1998)
    1/2 *
    A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
    Copyright 1999 by Serdar Yegulalp

What an offensive and repellent movie this is. "Patch Adams" has garnered praise from audiences everywhere, but that only underscores the idea that no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Drawn to some extent from a true story, it tells us about a fellow named, yes, Patch Adams (Robin Williams), who checks into a mental hospital as the movie starts. He's suicidal, but he quickly finds that the patients are more help to him than the doctors are. A more cynical, knowing movie would have addressed this by making Patch think, gee, maybe there are people worse off than me, but instead we're subjected to the dishonest fiction that in the asylum, it's the doctors who are really the sick ones.

Patch enrolls in medical school and is given the hardline about medicine by Dean Walcott (Bob Gunton): "We are going to take the humanity out of you and make you into something BETTER," he intones ominously. Anyone who has seen more than two movies in their lifetime will instantly realize that the Walcott character is being set up for us as a strawman, and that this film is a stacked deck.

Patch fights back against the "impersonality" of medicine by trying to be every patient's best friend, a Holy Fool to the invalids. The only problem is that he does this by being an unholy pain in the ass. He puts bedpans on his feet and tapdances; he cuts off the ends of enema bulbs and sticks them on his nose; he straps himself to a motorized bed and feigns being thrown around on it. It's not that any of this stuff is unfunny, but that it's wrongheaded. Any doctor started jollying me up like this, I'd phone my HMO.

I said the movie was a stacked deck, and there isn't a scene that doesn't go towards reinforcing that. Adams is the free-spirited rebel, the nonconformist, and everyone who stands in his way is just a stuffed-shirt with no blood in their veins. This is neither true nor convincing. If the movie had an ounce of honesty, it would show that people who assume the role of the rebel or nonconformist do not often do it out of altruism or benevolence, but out of immaturity or the need for attention. Break a window, and poof! you're a rebel.

The film's gears are loud and persistent. Patch has (no!) a Love Interest (Monica Potter), who serves no purpose in the story except to die at the worst possible time and throw Patch into a (manufactured) pit of despair from which he must climb out. And once he does climb out, there's a giant piece of speechmaking for him at the end of the movie, where Patch cries out against modern medicine's cold heart, etc., etc.

This I could have tolerated, but there is one additional piece of shameless manipulation that left me speechless. On cue, the doors open, and in come a whole slew of sick children, chemotherapy patients that Patch gave enema-ball noses to earlier. The scene is horribly false in so many ways that I can barely count them. One, if those children are as ill as we have been led to believe, what are they doing out of bed? And two, isn't this a blatant ripoff of the equally bogus scene in the equally bogus "Dead Poets Society" (also a Robin Williams vehicle) where all those kids stand on their desks in "protest"?

It's one thing to be sentimental, but it's another thing entirely to use sentimentality in the service of a foolish, exploitive story. "Patch Adams" is not a three-hanky movie -- it's a subsidy plan for a Kleenex factory.

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