Review of Patch Adams (1998) by Jennifer S — 02 May 2010

I loved the idea of what Patch stood for, but Shadyac ended up taking everything to such a grotesque extreme that I wound up feeling immensely put off. The ideas in this movie were lovely, but nothing fell into place. Big Hollywood acting ultimately ended up falling apart at the seams and had me waiting for the whole damn thing to be over. I only kept watching instead of taking the DVD out of my computer drive because, hey, I can't keep reviewing movies that earn only 7's and 8's all the time. There's gotta be some variety. So there you go.

I do admit that seeing the medical attitudes toward anything that didn't Fit The Box back in those days made me feel pretty disgusted. I had hoped that this would serve as a great backdrop and ideological "villain" for Patch to stand up against, given his actor's capacity for comedy all around. It started out pretty decently, what with Patch fighting the imaginary squirrels and all, but when he met Karin things just went downhill from there. Simply put, Karin is the movie's victim character. She exists to die and make Patch all weepy about his mission to Make the World Laugh. There are so many things wrong with her existence in this movie at all that I don't even want to go into all of them. I just hate the way she is portrayed as this holy defenseless martyr, hurt by everyone in the world except for Patch, selfless to the point of stupidity. Who the hell would be so stupid as to go into the home of a mentally unstable man in the middle of the night? In real life, the person who died in Patch's life was Patch's best male friend. This would have been Truman, the absolutely gorgeous sidekick guy who should have been the star of the movie. I am glad that he did not die, but at the same time, it would have made more sense for a guy to go to a psychopath's home instead of a woman who's already been assaulted by men before and would probably know not to put herself in a vulnerable position. If I were Patch's wife, whom Karin was based off of, I'd be seriously pissed that I'd been portrayed as such a one-dimensional weak character.

And then there's Patch. I rooted for him because I'd rather him than the stuffy, cold-hearted establishment. It soon became evident, though, that he's one of those people who can't stop joking around even if people repeatedly tell him to stop. There's a line that exists with humor versus being obnoxious and annoying, and he ran right over it without even bothering to stop. A lot of the time I just didn't think he was very funny either. I also thought it was extremely pretentious of him to think that he could cure or treat mental illnesses without a significant amount of training. His good intentions, as we can see, paved the road to that particular hell. And, back to that thing with Karin, there would SO have been allegations between that woman's parents and Patch. If my child died because she did something so ridiculously stupid and it looked like Patch encouraged that kind of thing, I'd be up Patch's ass about professing help for everyone including dangerous Norman Bates-like people. One can say that Patch at the very least encouraged her to do what she did by his dismissive comment in that scene at his hospital along the lines of, "Oh, that guy is just weird like everybody else. He is tortured inside, but won't actually hurt anybody." Yeah right. Great work, there, Patch. I almost felt that Patch should have been a professional hospital clown instead of an actual doctor. He has great ideas about helping people and loves to make people laugh, but I never saw him actually apply medical knowledge anywhere in the film.

And finally, this movie ends with a courtroom scene. This is not a courtroom movie - it just didn't fly. The Freud-like Board of Medicine member was too cliche, and so were the cancer kids returning to save Patch's day. Everything just ended up being so terribly contrived. And.... it would have been nice to hear that this movie in some way donated to or helped out the real Patch Adams' cause. It didn't. So apparently Shadyac just took this idea and ran with it, creating this absurd work that ultimately had none of the things that movies really do need to be good - tact... and subtlety.