The movie sucks because it goes too far in the fabrication of the REAL Patch Adams life just to make a profit. Even the real Hunter Adams said he hated the film and has stated that he wasn't happy with the fact that movie did nothing more to make him look like a "funny doctor" rather than the professional he is. Quote, "Adams has criticized the film, saying it eschewed an accurate representation of his beliefs in favor of commercial viability. He said that out of all aspects of his life and activism, the film portrayed him merely as a funny doctor. Furthermore, Adams stated, 'I hate that movie'."
But let's break things down shall we? The first departure the film makes from Adams' real life is his time in a mental institution. In the film we see a forty-five year old Patch Adams voluntarily checking himself into the institution because of suicidal tendencies. In real life, it never happened that way. Adams was institutionalized three times in one year but it was during his adolescence and never voluntarily. Because he suffered from severe bullying during high school thanks to "institutional injustice", he became unhappy and actively suicidal.
Departure Number Two. In the film, during his stay in the mental institution, Adams decides he wants to help people and decides to enroll in medical school. At this point, two years after his institutionalized stay, he is now forty-seven years old and considered "the oldest first year student" at the school and it's even joked at in the film. Again, this never happened in Adams' real life. He graduated high school in 1963, completed pre-med course work at George Washington University then began medical school and graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1971 with a Doctor of Medicine degree. There was no twenty-nine year lag, Adams immediately enrolled into medical school after his high school graduation.
Departure Number Three. In the film Patch Adams befriends Carin Fisher, a fellow student at the school and over the course of the film, they fall in love with each other. We learn her tragic backstory of being molested as a child causing her inability to trust people and more so, the inability to trust men. Of course as the love interest, she learns to trust Adams and as she does, she decides to trust the male character Lawrence "Larry" Silver, a deeply disturbed patient and is murdered by him. While it is a very sad, emotional piece for the movie, the fact remains that it never happened. There was no Carin Fisher in real life. Adams did have a close friend that was murdered in a similar way to Carin in the film, but the biggest difference was Adams' friend was MALE. Not only did the writers, director, and who ever else change the gender of Adams' friend, but they also decided that in order to really help sell the film, they needed to tweak that sad, emotional scene for the audience. So they felt that while it would be sad to mention the murder of Adams' friend, it would be much sadder if it was his love interest that was murdered, a love interest mind you that never existed so we can later have Adams have an internal struggle of whether or not to continue his medical practice. Sure the real Adams meets a fellow student named Linda whom he becomes romantically involved with during his last year at medical school and then later marries in 1975, but the fact still remains that the character Carin was not supposed to represent Linda, but the fabricated FEMALE version of Adams' close MALE friend that was murdered in real life. Not to mention, in the film the murder takes place after the opening of the Gesundheit! Institute when in real life, the murder took place BEFORE the institute was built.
Departure Number Four. In the film, Adams and his colleagues run into the problem of constantly running out of medical supplies for their institute and they come up with the solution of stealing from the hospital that's part of their school. No really, they steal. I know Patch mentions in the film that the hospital is starting to learn about them "borrowing" medical supplies, but let's face it! If they borrowed the supplies, it would imply that they actually asked permission to take the stuff first. If they had BORROWED anything, then they wouldn't need these clever disguises to sneak the supplies out of the hospital. So yeah, they're stealing. And big surprise, the real Adams NEVER stole medical supplies and he didn't open the Gesundheit! Institute without a medical license as implied in the film. If I were Adams, I'd be pissed off too that Hollywood is misrepresenting me as an incompetent doctor that steals from hospitals and opens an medical institute sans license.
So with all that, plus the fact that in the movie Adams is portrayed as just a "funny doctor" omitting any research and effort he put into his work, the character is simplified into nothing more than the eccentric rebel that wants to prove "laughter is the best medicine" while misrepresenting doctors as being cold, heartless tyrannical individuals. Yes, some medical professionals might act that way, but there are others out there that don't. They're NOT all the same. And I know someone on here mentioned earlier that doctors tend to act like, "they know more than you or you don't know as much as them because you're not a doctor" and some how that's unfair? Uh yeah, they act that way because IT'S TRUE! My guess is you're NOT a doctor and didn't spend years of your life studying medicine to learn to become a doctor. Just because they might act dickish about it, doesn't mean you get the right to categorize them all like that or demonize them for that attitude. Have you ever stopped to think why a lot of doctors don't become emotionally attached to all their patients? Because if they did, they wouldn't be able to properly perform their professional duties and each time they lost a patient to a disease, the doctor will become exceedingly depressed and blame themselves for the loss even if it's a situation where THEY knew there would be no way to help the person. Why do you think so many doctors condemned the book One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest? Yes, it opened our eyes to the way mental institutions were being run at the time practically being able to get away with neglect of their patients but it also says that someone with no medical knowledge like McMurphy can somehow come in and "cure" the patients of their problems by simply treating them like human beings rather than the very sick people they are that need medical care by introducing that idea "laughter is the best medicine" again.
This what I think Hollywood achieved with their portrayal of Patch Adams. While the real Adams studied hard by doing a lot of research and becoming a well respected physician in the medical community, Hollywood decided to make him more in the vein of McMurphy, an individual who knew little to nothing about medicine (in the movie it says he studied medicine for two years while in real life he spent a majority of time studying and achieving his degree) but is enough of the eccentric rebel to come in and shake things up and disprove years of research and training in a selfish attempt to prove that medicine is not always the answer. Let's face it, Robin Williams is doing nothing different in this film that he's already done in other movies like Good Morning Vietnam, Good Will Hunting, Bicentennial Man and Man of the Year. They're all the SAME character and Williams did nothing to make this invalid portrayal of Patch Adams any different from the others. It's crap!
Oh and if you don't believe the real Patch Adams hates this film and also finds the idea that people that watch the film and think they personally know him funny, he also said this little bit of damning evidence against Robin Williams and his portrayal of him (the real Adams) on film, "He (Robin Williams) made $21 million for four months of pretending to be me, in a very simplistic version, and did not give $10 to my free hospital. Patch Adams, the person, would have, if I had Robin's money, given all $21 million to a free hospital in a country where 80 million cannot get care." Just remember shortly after that was said, Mr. Williams became a spokesman for the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital for the past several years.
Oh members of IMDb, yours is a dim-witted and insane lot!
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