Patch Adams
USA 1998
Reviewed by Kevin Maher
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
North Virginia, 1969. After a failed suicide attempt Hunter Adams checks himself into Fairfax psychiatric hospital. Because he has a rapport with other patients and is disgusted with current medical practice, he decides to become a doctor himself. Two years later he attends Virginia Medical University. Unhappy with the lack of patient contact, Adams makes secret visits to the college hospital to entertain terminally ill children. Walcott, the dean of studies, finds out about Adams' trips and warns him to keep away from the hospital. Adams falls for one of his classmates, Carin, and continues visiting and entertaining the patients. He is discovered and given a final warning.
Unperturbed Adams decides to set up a free hospital in the countryside of West Virginia with Carin and another medical student, Truman. The hospital, named the Gesundheit Institute, is an immediate success. One night, while Adams and Truman are stealing basic supplies from the college hospital, Carin is murdered by a Gesundheit patient. Walcott learns of Gesundheit and expels Adams from the college for practising without being qualified. Adams goes to the board of appeal to plead his case. At the hearing, Adams defends Gesundheit and demands that doctors care more for their patients. He is reinstated by the board and later graduates.
Review
"You have a gift, you have a way with people - they like you!" is just one of the many platitudinous commendations repeatedly hurled at Robin Williams' 'Patch' Adams in this excessively sentimental movie. Playing a benevolent doctor of laughter, Williams returns once again here to the altruistic man-child persona that first gained him fame in the television series Mork & Mindy and was honed in such films as Dead Poets Society, The Fisher King, Jack and Jumanji. Yet in crafting Patch Adams into an archetypal 'Robin Williams vehicle' comedy director Tom Shadyac (Liar Liar) and writer Steve Oedekerk (who co-wrote The Nutty Professor with Shadyac and others) have merely highlighted how limited and reductive this same wide-eyed persona has become.
The film-makers have taken the admirably radical life of Hunter Doherty Adams as described in the quasi-autobiographical book Gesundheit: Good Health is a Laughing Matter, and processed it through the screenwriting mill. Gone are the years spent touring Europe, the trips to Russia, the pleas for world peace, the work in black ghettos and the conscientious-objector status - all elements formally and politically problematic for a mainstream movie. Instead, ten days of positive affirmation in a mental institution and a week of arguments with Dean Walcott are transformed, pace Joseph Campbell or John Grisham, into the key structural trials of Adams' life. (Incidentally, Adams earned the moniker 'Patch' from the black anti-Vietnam badge he always wore on his doctor's lapel, and not, as the movie so quaintly suggests, from fixing a leaking cup with sticky-tape.)
Then there's Adams himself. Familiar to many Americans from his numerous television appearances, at a lanky six feet and four inches, with long hair and a conspicuous Salvador Dali moustache, he could hardly be physically farther from Williams' short, neatly cropped and clean-shaven hero. Of course, this hardly matters since Williams is clearly playing Williams here. And though Patch Adams flirts with the staples of the college flick, the hospital tearjerker and the courtroom drama, the greater part of its effect depends upon how one feels about Williams' slapstick and manic-delivery shtick. Director Shadyac underscores Williams' comic routines with superfluous and frankly relentless reaction shots of patients and hospital staff alike crumpling with laughter. It's an effect that becomes strangely numbing, and it helps convince us that yet again we're watching a showcase for Williams' familiar talents rather than the natural progression of a fictional character.
Finally, and in what can only be described as an immense lapse in judgement, the film-makers have chosen to have real cancer-stricken children playing themselves in the hospital scenes. This means that after some predictable lip-service is paid to dying with dignity and humanity, the children are wheeled out in the movie's closing courtroom scene as a visual punchline to Adams' syrupy rhetoric. That real pain and suffering could be used so casually and insouciantly is a sad indictment of a movie that purports to deal with the altruism of its central character while assuaging only the egotism of its star.
Credits
- Producers
- Barry Kemp
- Mike Farrell
- Marvin Minoff
- Charles Newirth
- Screenplay
- Steve Oedekerk
- Based on the book Gesundheit: Good Health Is a Laughing Matter by
- Hunter Doherty Adams
- Maureen Mylander
- Director of Photography
- Phedon Papamichael
- Editor
- Don Zimmerman
- Production Designer
- Linda DeScenna
- Music
- Marc Shaiman
- ©Universal City Studios, Inc
- Production Companies
- Universal Pictures presents a Blue Wolf, Farrell/Minoff, Bungalow 78 production
- Executive Producers
- Marsha Garces Williams
- Tom Shadyac
- Co-producers
- Steve Oedekerk
- Devorah Moos-Hankin
- Associate Producers
- Alan B. Curtiss
- Allegra Clegg
- Production Co-ordinator
- Debra James
- Unit Production Manager
- Allegra Clegg
- Supervising Location Manager
- Michael John Meehan
- Location Manager
- Rory W. Enke
- Assistant Directors
- Alan B. Curtiss
- Jonathan Watson
- David Bernstein
- Rebecca S. Greeley
- Script Supervisor
- Carol De Pasquale
- Casting
- Debra Zane
- San Francisco:
- Beau Bonneau
- North Carolina:
- Kim Petrosky
- ADR Voice:
- Barbara Harris
- Camera Operators
- Patrick Loungway
- Kim Marks
- Special Visual Effects
- Sony Pictures Imageworks Inc
- Visual Effects Supervisor:
- Sheena Duggal
- Visual Effects Producer:
- Julia Rivas
- Visual Effects Executive Producer:
- Jenny Fulle
- Computer Graphics Supervisors:
- Sam Richards
- Thomas Hollier
- Digital Production Manager:
- Dawn Guinta
- Visual Effects Editor:
- Guy Wiedmann
- Butterfly Animation:
- David Schaub
- High Speed Compositing Artists:
- Marguerite Cargill
- Doug Forrest
- David Takayama
- Compositing Artists:
- Daniel Eaton
- Layne Friedman
- Technical Designer:
- Max Bruce
- 2D/3D Painter:
- Raquel Morales
- Matte Painter:
- Robert Stromberg
- Rotoscope Artists:
- Maura N. Alvarez
- Joanie Karnowski
- Susan Kornfeld
- Modeller:
- Ivo Kos
- Film Scanning/Recording:
- Attila Veress
- Visual Effects Editor
- Scott Hill
- Special Effects Co-ordinator
- David Blitstein
- Art Director
- Jim Nedza
- Lead Set Designer
- Erin Kemp
- Senior Set Designer
- Don Weinger
- Set Designers
- Doug Pierce
- Dawn Swiderski
- Set Decorator
- Ric McElvin
- Storyboard Artist
- Dan Sweetman
- Costume Designer
- Judy Ruskin-Howell
- Costume Supervisor
- Mary Lane
- Make-up
- Key:
- Hallie D'Amore
- Artist:
- Mindy Hall
- Key Hair Stylist
- Judy Cory
- Titles/Opticals
- Pacific Title/Mirage
- Music Conductor
- Pete Anthony
- Music Orchestratrions
- Jeff Atmajian
- Frank Bennett
- Patrick Russ
- Pete Anthony
- Music Producer
- Marc Shaiman
- Song Co-ordinator
- Andrew Dorfman
- Supervising Music Editor
- J.J. George
- Music Scoring Mixer
- Dennis Sands
- Music Programmer
- Nick Vidar
- Auricle
- Richard Grant
- Richard Bronskill
- Soundtrack
- "All God's Chillen Got Wings" (trad), arranged/ adapted by Harry Ruby, Bert Kalmar; "American Patrol" by F.W. Meacham; "Bell Bottom Blues" by Eric Clapton, performed by Derek and the Dominoes; "Blue Skies" by Irving Berlin; "Carry On" by Stephen Stills, performed by Crosby, Stills & Nash & Young; "Chattanooga Choo Choo" by Harry Warren, Mack Gordon, performed by members of The Glenn Miller Orchestra; "Für Elise" by Ludwig van Beethoven; "Good Lovin'" by Rudy Clark, Arthur Resnick, performed by The Rascals; "Into the Mystic" by/performed by Van Morrison; "Let it Rain" by Eric Clapton, Bonnie Bramlett, performed by Eric Clapton; "Oh Suzanna" (from the film Duck Soup) by Steven Foster, arranged/adapted by Harry Ruby, Bert Kalmar; "Only You Know and I Know" by/performed by Dave Mason; "People Got to Be Free" by Eddie Brigati Jr., Felix Cavaliere, performed by The Rascals; "Stand" by Sylvester Stewart, performed by Sly & the Family Stone; "The Country's Going to War" (from the film Duck Soup) by Harry Ruby, Bert Kalmar; "The Weight" by
- J.R. Robertson, performed by The Band; "What Is Life" by/performed by George Harrison
- Sound Mixers
- Nelson Stoll
- Steve Maslow
- Gregg Landaker
- Recordists
- Brion A. Paccassi
- Frank J. Fleming
- Stage Engineers
- John Clavin
- Jay Palmer
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Michael Hilkene
- Dialogue Editors
- Gaston Biraben
- Avram Gold
- Sound Effects Editors
- Odin Benitez
- Randall Guth
- Michael Jonascu
- Piero Mura
- Additional Sound Effects Recording
- Ken J. Johnson
- ADR
- Recordist:
- Rick Canelli
- Mixer:
- Thomas J. O'Connell
- Editor:
- Chris Welch
- Foley
- Supervisor:
- Solange S. Schwalbe
- Artists:
- Dan O'Connell
- John Cucci
- Recordist:
- Debbie Seaman
- Mixer:
- James Ashwill
- Editor:
- John O. Wilde
- One Step Up
- Medical Technical Advisers
- Mary J. Alen
- Denise Lewis
- Cast
- Robin Williams
- Hunter 'Patch' Adams
- Monica Potter
- Carin
- Daniel London
- Truman
- Philip Seymour Hoffman
- Mitch
- Bob Gunton
- Dean Walcott
- Josef Sommer
- Doctor Eaton
- Irma P. Hall
- Joletta
- Frances Lee McCain
- Judy
- Harve Presnell
- Dean Anderson
- Daniella Kuhn
- Adelane
- Jake Bowen
- Bryan
- Peter Coyote
- Bill Davis
- James Greene
- Bile
- Michael Jeter
- Rudy
- Harold Gould
- Arthur Mendelson
- Bruce Bohne
- Trevor Beene
- Harry Groener
- Doctor Pack
- Barry 'Shabaka' Henley
- Emmet
- Stephen Anthony Jones
- Charlie
- Richard Kiley
- Doctor Titan
- Douglas Roberts
- Larry
- Ellen Albertini Dow
- Aggie
- Alan Tudyk
- Everton
- Ryan Hurst
- Neil
- Peter Siiteri
- chess man
- Tim Wiggins
- scared customer
- Helen Tourtillot
- feeble woman
- On West
- instructor
- Domenique Lozano
- passerby
- Ralph Peduto
- organizer
- Ken Hoffman
- big Texan
- Jim Antonio
- Roy Conrad
- E.R. doctors
- Jay Jacobus
- Jack Walton
- Dot-Marie Jones
- Miss Meat
- Geoff Fiorito
- Samuel Sheng
- 3rd year students
- Kathleen Stefano
- Margery
- Piers MacKenzie
- Doctor Hashman
- Alex Gonzalez
- Hispanic boy
- Ismael 'East' Carlo
- Hispanic father
- Cameron Brooke Stanley
- Jamieson G. Downes
- Jena Marie Thomas
- Wesley G. Haines
- children's ward patients
- Richard J. Silberg
- William Joseph Scharf
- James Anthony Cotton
- Michael Rae Sommers
- Howard Allison Williams
- David Fine
- James Carraway
- J. Stephen Coyle
- psych patients
- Wanda McCaddon
- woman in lobby
- Wanda Christine
- Nurse Klegg
- Lorri Holt
- pediatric nurse
- Stephanie Smith
- laughing nurse
- Mary Delorenzo
- nurse
- Vivia
- hysterical woman
- Donna Kimball
- waitress
- Norman Alden
- truck driver
- Lydell M. Cheshier
- younger man
- Diane Amos
- Sonya Eddy
- older waitresses
- Kelvin Yee
- orderly
- Doreen Chou Croft
- Asian woman
- Bill Roberson
- Fred Jarvis
- Randy Oglesby
- pinstriped man
- Vilma Vitanza
- Maria
- Bonnie Johnson
- Walcott's secretary
- Jack Ford
- lecturer
- Christine Pineda
- Hispanic girl
- Karen Michel
- Mrs Davis
- James Allen
- Ed
- Katherine A. Fitzhugh
- Mrs O'Bannon
- Kyle Timothy Smith
- Jonathan Holder
- Davis' sons
- Renee Rogers
- Shanón Orrock
- receptionists
- Don Rizzo
- minister
- Andrew Clement
- puppeteer
- George Lee Masters
- Daniel P. Hannafin
- Roger W. Durrett
- boardroom doctors
- Richard C. Adkins
- Ralph David Westfall
- Bob Feaster
- Thom McIntyre
- Alfred Salley
- Michael Kennedy
- gynaecologists
- Certificate
- 12
- Distributor
- United International Pictures (UK) Ltd
- 10,391 feet
- 115 minutes 27 seconds
- Digital DTS sound/SDDS/Dolby digital
- Colour by
- DeLuxe