Stocking Stuffers

Going in, you may know dread: Robin Williams as yet another sensitive authority figure (in this case, a doctor) who stands yet another cold institution on its head by organizing its oppressed (in this case, his patients and fellow med students) into a live poets society that places him on a collision course with the powers that be. (You know it’s an uphill fight when a film’s coming attraction is predictable.) What keeps Patch Adams from sailing off the tall cliff of its own sentiment is that it’s based on a true story. Writer Steve Oedekerk (The Nutty Professor) and director Tom Shadyac (The Nutty Professor, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Liar Liar) never cheat life’s weirder, crueler twists and turns. They begin in a mental hospital, where the suicidal Adams (Williams) is a self-committed patient. A natural clown endowed with an inventor’s curiosity, he earns the nickname "Patch" because he has better success patching his fellow patients together than the sanitarium’s self-absorbed doctors do. More importantly, the other patients heal Patch: He checks out of the hospital and straight into med school. His hard-won experience puts him at formulaic odds with the school’s more professional bias. The wicked dean (Bob Gunton) menaces Patch on cue, threatening him with expulsion for his unconventional ways with the patients. The gorgeous but icy classmate who catches Patch’s eye (Monica Potter, of Without Limits) melts more or less on schedule. Nevertheless, there’s a healthy restraint in both the writing and the playing that softens these plotty clockworks and lets what’s best and unique in the characters come through. Williams is a great clown, as we all know, but with their comedic backgrounds, Oedekerk and Shadyac give him room to really cut loose, and cure the movie. There are more laughs than tears here. That’s as it should be. (F.X. Feeney) (Citywide)

The heroine (Helena Bonham Carter) suffers from a degenerative muscle disease, the movie from schizophrenia, and Kenneth Branagh’s performance as a semi-suicidal artist suffers, period. Richard, the artist, attempts suicide (sort of) in the film’s first scene, for no clear reason. He is sentenced — attempted suicide being, in Britain, a form of disturbing the peace — to some time in the country, where he must do "community service." He becomes a captive companion to the wheelchair-bound heroine, whose impending death has boosted her flare for hostile sarcasm. Bonham Carter is excellent: She inhabits this woman’s affliction with illuminating precision. Branagh is at sea: What ails this guy? When the young woman asks the artist if he would be so kind as to relieve her of her virginity, his reaction is to plan a bank robbery so they can hire a handsome gigolo instead. He is also constructing a makeshift airplane out of spare parts, hence the title. It’s plain enough on a conceptual level that his real flight is from his attraction to this woman, but writer Richard Hawkins and director Paul Greengrass fail to make this idea come to life emotionally. The result is a mess. Bonham Carter is a magnetic fox, even when felled by a wretched infirmity; one is constantly wondering what this lesser half of a hero is so afraid of. (FXF) (Selected theaters)