Robin Williams is likeable and often funny as the clown who wants to be a doctor, and Tom Shadyac trusts none of it, so every scene arrives with strings attached. Some of it lands. Most is a lecture wearing a red nose.
Tom Shadyac’s film, from a screenplay by Steve Oedekerk and the book by the real Patch Adams, has one idea and holds it up to the light for 115 minutes: a doctor should treat the person in the bed, not the chart at the end of it. It is a decent idea. Plenty of people who have sat in a hospital corridor will nod at it. The trouble is that Patch Adams does not argue the idea or test it; it announces it, scores it, and then has a character say it again in case the strings were not clear.
Williams is the reason to be here, and for stretches he is enough. Judy Ruskin Howell puts him in shirts you could see from the car park, and he moves through the wards like a man who has never once been told to sit down. The enema bulb on the nose is a good gag. So is the bedpan footwear, and the way he talks to a dying man about what he had for breakfast. We laughed, properly, more than once. Then we noticed that every laugh was followed by a close-up of a child’s face and a swell from the orchestra, and that the film did not believe we would get the point unless it was underlined, and we started to resent being managed.
The cast around him is better than the parts. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Mitch, the roommate who has worked all his life for this and cannot stand to watch someone treat it as a party, and in two or three scenes he makes a real case against Patch that the script then forgets to answer. Daniel London is a warm, easy presence as Truman. Monica Potter is given very little as Carin beyond a reluctance that melts on schedule, and she does what she can with it. Bob Gunton’s Dean Walcott is the villain, and the film never once allows him a sentence a sane person might agree with, which is a pity, because the questions he raises about who is allowed to touch a sick child are not stupid ones.
The craft is handsome and it works against the material. Phedon Papamichael shoots everything in a soft, late-afternoon light, so that even the asylum looks like somewhere you might book a weekend. Linda DeScenna’s wards are bright and uncluttered, and the ramshackle house Patch wants to turn into a free clinic is the only room in the film that looks lived in. Marc Shaiman’s score is the problem. It tells you what to feel before the actors have finished, and Don Zimmerman cuts to its rhythm, so that scenes which might have breathed are chopped into reaction shots and swells. A quieter film would have let Williams sit with a patient for a minute in silence. This one cannot wait that long.
There is one scene that got past our guard. Peter Coyote plays Bill Davis, a man dying slowly and furiously, who wants nothing from anyone and least of all from a medical student in a clown nose. What Patch eventually does for him we will not describe, but Coyote plays the shift from rage to something else without a word, and for about two minutes the film stops explaining itself and simply watches. We were moved, and we were slightly annoyed about it, because it showed what the rest of the picture could have been.
The second half takes a turn we will not reveal. We will say that the film uses it to hand Patch a speech, and that the speech is the moment our patience ran out.
Shadyac made Liar Liar the year before, a comedy built entirely on a star’s body and face, and it worked because it knew that was all it was. Here he has the same instinct and a subject that asks for more. Williams had already played the inspiring teacher in Dead Poets Society and the wounded healer in Good Will Hunting, and this is both of those again, with the hard edges filed off. Most critics landed where we have, somewhere between a shrug and a sigh, and we think they were right.
If you want Williams being kind to sick people for two hours, you will get exactly that, and you may have a good cry. Go in knowing the film will not trust you to find the feeling on your own, and keep an eye on Coyote, who found it anyway.
