Playing the lead role of Hunter `Patch' Adams, he is at once comical and pensive, taking you through a chiaroscuro of laughter and pain, before emerging from the depths of gloom like a butterfly in spring.

Basd on Adam's book, `Gesundheit: Good Health is a Laughing Matter', Patch Adams is a movie that stands witness to the attempts of an individual to move against the stream, as he tries to change the established methodology of what is good for patients and what is not. Patch, a middle-aged medical student, decides to liberate the patients from the chloroformed, starched regimen of hospitals and treat them more like humans with an appetite for life and fun, than as mere bodies in need of clinical healing.

So, despite repeated warnings from the Dean (Bob Gunton), Patch ventures into the patient's rooms, the general ward, children's section, sometimes in a joker's get-up, sometimes as an angel complete with the halo, all the while talking to the terminally ill, holding their hands, understanding their deepest fears, even cravings. And when he sets up a sanitarium, an old lady in the hospital is allowed to fulfill her childhood fantasy, that of jumping in a tub full of noodles(!)

Trouble is swift to come, Karin (Monica Potter), his sweetheart and a fellow student, is murdered by a man posing as a patient at the sanitarium and later, when Dean Walcott brings Patch under legal inquiry. With all odds against him, as he faces a committee that will decide whether to rusticate him, Patch sticks to his convictions, that the role of a doctor is `not just to prevent death, but to improve the quality of life'.

Although the brilliance of Robin Williams' performance stays with you long after the movie is over, also of note is Monica Potter as the student who has struggled to be in a medical school, and would rather go by the norm than endanger her future as a doctor. A must see for Robin Williams fans.