December 24–31, 1998
movies
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Not being sure whether or not it's ethical for a reviewer to call for an actor's public execution, I instead offer this compromise: a bounty on Robin Williams' SAG card. He may live, but just don't let him act.
There was a time when Williams' gerbil-on-amphetamine shtick was amusing, but that time has long since passed into the mists. Ever since Dead Poets Society showed Williams the power of a weepy-eyed stare and a rousing monologue, the guy has been about as appealing as a nagging case of athlete's foot. Although not actually a bad actor, Williams consistently aligns himself with some of the most self-important, drippingly nauseating products of the Hollywood machine, movies which ardently preach originality while failing to manifest any.
What Dreams May Come, Williams' latest vehicle, was one of the steamiest deposits Hollywood has laid in a while, and while Patch Adams isn't nearly as repugnant, it's full of the same kind of moralizing homilies that Williams seems to deliver like most people answer the phone. In life as in the movies, Williams seems to be out to enlighten us all one person at a time. But if Williams is the only one lighting candles, I'd rather work on my night vision.
In Patch, Williams plays a middle-aged medical student whose time as a mental-ward inmate has convinced him that patients need to be treated as much with good spirits as with stethoscopes, to treat the patient, not the illness. This is actually a fairly rich, and more importantly, unexplored subject, one which keeps the film from sinking to the teary, fraudulent depths of a movie like Stepmom. Though the writers of TV's ER have done a more sophisticated job of probing this issue through the character of John Carter, who has repeatedly been forced to choose between advancing his own career and caring for individual patients, Williams' Patch is less a nurturer than Noah Wyle's Carter, more a freewheeling clown (surprise) whose only aim is to bring laughter to the lives of people who have forsaken joy.
Director Tom Shadyac (Liar Liar, The Mask) and writer Steve Oedekerk (Nothing to Lose) are both novices when it comes to this kind of large-scale sentiment, and it shows. Despite their contention that Patch is laughing in the face of death, we see almost nothing of the kind of gruesome goings-on that happen in hospitals all the time, which is not only a cop-out but diminishes any sense of Patch's supposed achievement, the same way Life is Beautiful's sketchy depiction of the Holocaust diminished its elevation of Roberto Benigni's character to some sort of comic saint. But where Life is Beautiful had the sense to keep its sentiment confined to Benigni's performance, Patch Adams layers on the dimpled lighting and inspirational music, throwing bells on the soundtrack so often you'd think the hospital was located next to a windchime factory. Patch Adams isn't Robin Williams worst film, but it certainly marks him as a sentimental recidivist. Stop him before he acts again.
