Patch Adams (1998)

Patch Adams arrived in December of 1998 with the full weight of Universal's holiday machinery behind it, and it made a great deal of money. Critics were less enthusiastic. Roger Ebert suggested the screen required disinfecting. The film endures as a case study in the sentimental biopic, a genre that asks us to weep on schedule and then rewards us with a standing ovation in a hearing room.

The film's cultural awareness is thin and largely incidental. Irma P. Hall appears as a nurse, the only notable non-white face in a cast otherwise composed of earnest white medical students, and the story makes no comment on her presence. Race is simply not a subject the screenplay wishes to raise. Nor does it raise questions of sexuality, environment, or bodily self-acceptance. Those are absent entirely. The treatment of Monica Potter's Carin Fisher is the more instructive failure. She exists to be romanced and then murdered, a woman's death converted into fuel for a man's spiritual crisis, a narrative transaction so old it creaks.

Where the film does lean toward a message, it concerns medicine itself. The Gesundheit Institute treats patients without insurance and the screenplay sneers at profit-driven hospitals, though the critique remains a matter of warm humanism instead of economic argument. The preaching is relentless and soft: humor as the best medicine, stated early, restated often, finally delivered as a courtroom address to a panel of stern physicians. It is sermonizing in a cardigan. The real Hunter Adams has spent decades distancing himself from the result, which is its own kind of review.