We could begin with the ungrammatical full title of the movie, which is: The Opposite Sex and How to Live with Them. Mrs. Seward, who drummed rhetoric into us at Urbana High School, would have cracked director Matthew Meshekoff over the knuckles for that one. She would have gone on to describe his script as “trite,” which was one of her favorite words, but which I have never used in a review, until now.
The movie stars Ayre Gross as David, a stockbroker who hangs out with his best buddy, Eli (Kevin Pollak). They’re regulars in the kind of lower-level singles bar that has a periscope sticking up out of the sidewalk so they can see the babes coming. Yes. They believe their days of happy bachelorhood can last forever, and they explain their theories in “comic” monologues that they deliver while looking straight at the camera, while I found myself looking at my watch. You know a movie is slow when you start looking to see what time it is. You know it’s awful when you start shaking your watch to see if it has stopped.
One day David meets Carrie (Courteney Cox), who works, as I have mentioned, in the mayor’s office. They come from different worlds, according to the press materials, which describe them as “a Jewish stockbroker and a WASPy mayoral aide.” I believe they come from exactly the same world, the twilight zone of sitcomland, where they learned that a conversation consists of straight lines, punch lines, one-liners, and asides to themselves, friends, and/or the audience. It would be madness trying to carry on a conversation with people like this. You’d be wondering why nobody wrote your lines.
David and Carrie meet, fall in love, get real serious, and then, according to the ancient laws of formulas that the shameless filmmakers borrow from countless other films, they get cold feet. After All, They Come From Different Worlds. I know I am repeating myself, but the movie offers me nothing new to say.
Then he tries dating around, and she goes out with a sensitive type, but gee, wouldn’t you know they miss one another, and so they get back together again, followed by one of those endings in which everything depends on one character being able to find another character at a time and place when no living person could have possibly found him there.
My requirements for movies are so simple. All I ask is that the characters be of reasonable intelligence—at least smart enough so that I could spend half an hour with them with slight interest. If not intelligent, then they should be kooky, or stupid in some original way, or even sexy will do. But if they bring nothing to the party, my response is obvious: Why make a movie about them?
Patch Adams
(Directed by Tom Shadyac; starring Robin Williams; 1998)
Patch Adams made me want to spray the screen with Lysol. This movie is shameless. It’s not merely a tearjerker. It extracts tears individually by liposuction, without anesthesia. It is allegedly based on the life of a real man named Patch Adams, who I have seen on television, where he looks like Salvador Dali’s seedy kid brother. If all of these things really happened to him, they should have abandoned Robin Williams and brought in Jerry Lewis for the telethon.
As the movie opens, a suicidal Patch has checked into a mental hospital. There he finds that the doctors don’t help him, but the patients do. On the outside, he determines to become a doctor in order to help people, and enrolls in a medical school. Soon he finds, not to our amazement, that medicine is an impersonal business. When a patient is referred to by bed number or disease, Patch reasonably asks, “What’s her name?”
Patch is a character. To himself, he’s an irrepressible bundle of joy, a zany live wire who brings laughter into the lives of the sick and dying. To me, he’s a pain in the wazoo. If this guy broke into my hospital room and started tap-dancing with bedpans on his feet, I’d call the cops.
The lesson of Patch Adams is that laughter is the best medicine. I know Norman Cousins cured himself by watching Marx Brothers movies, but to paraphrase Groucho, I enjoy a good cigar, but not when it explodes. I’ve been lucky enough to discover doctors who never once found it necessary to treat me while wearing a red rubber nose.
In the movie, Patch plays the clown to cheer up little tikes whose hair has fallen out from chemotherapy. Put in charge of the school welcoming committee for a gynecologist’s convention, he builds a papier màché prop: Enormous spread legs reaching an apex at the entrance to the lecture hall. What a card. He’s the nonconformist, humanist, warmhearted rebel who defies the cold and materialist establishment and stands up for clowns and free spirits everywhere. This is a role Robin Williams was born to play. In fact, he was born playing it.
We can see at the beginning where the movie is headed, but we think maybe we can jump free before the crash. No luck. (Spoiler warning!) Consider, for example, the character named Carin (Monica Potter), who is one of Patch’s fellow students. She appears too late in the movie to be a major love interest. Yet Patch does love her. Therefore, she’s obviously in the movie for one purpose only: to die. The only suspense involves her function in the movie’s structure, which is inspired by those outlines that Hollywood writing coaches flog to their students: Will her death provide the False Crisis, or the Real Crisis?
She’s only good for the False Crisis, which I will not reveal, except to say that it is cruel and arbitrary, stuck in merely to get a cheap effect. It inspires broodings of worthlessness in Patch, who ponders suicide, but sees a butterfly, and pulls himself together for the False Dawn. Life must go on, and he must continue his mission to save sad patients from their depression. They may die, but they’ll die laughing.
The False Dawn (the upbeat before the final downbeat) is a lulu. A dying woman refuses to eat. Patch convinces her to take nourishment by filling a plastic wading pool with spaghetti and jumping around in it. This is the perfect approach, and soon the wretched woman is gobbling her pasta. I hope she got some from the part he hadn’t stepped in.
Next comes the Real Crisis. Patch is threatened with expulsion from medical school. I rubbed my eyes with incredulity: There is a courtroom scene! Courtrooms are expected in legal movies. But in medical tearjerkers, they’re the treatment of last resort. Any screenwriter who uses a courtroom scene in a nonlegal movie is not only desperate for a third act, but didn’t have a second act that led anywhere.
What a courtroom. It’s like a John Grisham wet dream. This could be the set for Inherit the Wind. The main floor and balcony are jammed with Patch’s supporters, with a few seats up front for the villains. There’s no legalistic mumbo-jumbo; these people function simply as an audience for Patch’s narcissistic grandstanding. (Spoiler warning No. 2.) After his big speech, the courtroom doors open up, and who walks in? All those bald little chemotherapy kids that Patch cheered up earlier. And yes, dear reader, each and every one is wearing a red rubber nose. Should these kids be out of bed? Their immune systems are shot to hell. If one catches cold and dies, there won’t be any laughing during the malpractice suit.
I have nothing against sentiment, but it must be earned. Cynics scoffed at Robin Williams’s previous film, What Dreams May Come, in which he went to heaven and then descended into hell to save the woman he loved. Corny? You bet—but with the courage of its convictions. It made no apologies and exploited no formulas. It was the real thing. Patch Adams is quackery.