Patch Adams

Some movies rate four stars out of four. And some movies simply blow the top off the rating scale. Patch Adams is of this kind, a movie that can change your life.

Patch Adams begins with a man (played by Robin Williams) in the prime of his life, a man who commits himself to a mental institution because he has been contemplating suicide. In the institution he finds men who are much worse off than himself, and he is moved to try to help them by reacting to them as people rather than as a disease. In the process he discovers the joy of helping, and he discovers a reason for living.

He leaves the mental institution and enrolls in medical school. To his dismay he learns that he won't be interacting with patients until his third year. Finding this restriction intolerable, he bends and breaks rules in his quest to help the patients in the teaching hospital. In one memorable scene after another, he reaches out to the patients and gets them to laugh and enjoy life. This course of action naturally puts him in trouble with the authorities of the medical school, notably the Dean.

Patch recruits other medical students to his cause, and falls in love with one of them. This woman tells him that she's afraid to help him in his pursuits because "people get hurt." However, he wins her over and gets her help in setting up and running a live-in free hospital. He also gets the help of other medical students and some nurses from the teaching hospital.

Some of the scenes with her are remarkably intense and sweetly moving. Her later death is almost too unbearable to be put in a movie. Its aftermath is fortunately dealt with briefly, yet very effectively. This death causes Patch to doubt his choices and contemplate suicide once again, but the timely intervention of a butterfly turns him back to the right path. The movie ends with Patch's triumph over the Dean and his return to the patients he loves to help.

This movie never hit a wrong note. The acting in particular is effective and very real ("If you can fake sincerity, you've got it made"). The message is simple but not simple-minded: that the healing relationship between doctor and patient demands the engagement of doctor with patient as "I and Thou," human being to human being in equality and compassion.

Robin Williams is great in this role, energetic, winning, consistently doing exactly the right thing at the right time. It's not a performance of understatement, but rather of forceful and convincing statement. Reminiscent of Dead Poets Society, this is a portrait of a passionate man who is very cognizant of the bounds that society places on passion, and working to stretch those bounds to the limit. He seeks to topple human idols from their inappropriate pedestals, for the good of the suffering. A movie like this redeems the entire medium from its excesses. It's a movie about loosening up, for the right reasons, and I found it utterly convincing and uplifting.

Reading Patch Adams's book and Roger Ebert's review of this movie has greatly dampened my enthusiasm. It disturbs me that cynical manipulation was done to the effective truth of Adams's life. The romance and murder, and probably much else, were added by the script writer. That's a shame, even though the romance and the aftermath of the murder were handled effectively by the director and made convincing by the performers. It's a shame because it turns the truth into a semi-fiction, a kind of monstrosity. This movie has been displaced from my all-time top ten list, and I'm sure that I'll never be able to watch it again with anything like the involvement I felt the first time. I feel like I've been had, taken in by cynical Hollywood con men. This reaction is probably unfair; all movies are fictions.

I'm beginning to think that I'm becoming a "sucker" for movies, being more absorbed in them as I watch, being less able to maintain critical distance. This is good for my enjoyment, but bad for my review writing.