In the movie, Patch plays the clown to cheer up little tykes whose hair has fallen out from chemotherapy. Put in charge of the school welcoming committee for a gynecologists' convention, he builds a papier-mache prop: enormous spread legs reaching an apex at a lecture hall entrance. What a card. He's the nonconformist, humanist, warm-hearted 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 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 good only 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 again, but sees a butterfly and pulls himself together for the False Dawn. Life must go on, and he must continue his mission to save 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 persuades 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 would have asked for 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 non-legal movie is not only desperate for a third act, but didn't have a second act that led anywhere.