Cinema: Ho, Ho (Well, No)

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The latest installment in Robin Williams' campaign for screen sainthood casts him as Hunter ("Patch") Adams, a medical student whose belief that "we have to treat the patient as well as the disease" sends him into patients' rooms with balloon animals, an enema-bulb clown nose and a song in his heart (Blue Skies).

There's wisdom in the Reader's Digest bromide that laughter is the best medicine; we could name two recent invalids whose hearts were lifted by David Sedaris' impression of Billie Holiday singing the Oscar Mayer jingle on NPR. But waking old folks at midnight and making loud mischief seem like a manic camp counselor's idea of fun: indoctrination by comedy. The supporting characters, from the hospital dean (Harve Presnell) to Patch's girlfriend (Monica Potter), are similarly bludgeoned. They begin as skeptics and end, their wills crushed, as dewy believers.

What's even sadder is the talent wasted. Director Tom Shadyac's other films (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective; The Nutty Professor; Liar Liar) are bright, off-kilter farces; scripter Steve Oedekerk wrote Professor. It is a crime against humority that they and Williams (who in a chair next to Letterman is still our most brilliant word surrealist) renounce the work they've practiced with such abandon and invention for Patch's bullying sentimentality. Comics who want to do Hamlet often end up, as here, serving big, sticky slices of ham. --R.C.

THE HI-LO COUNTRY STARRING: Billy Crudup, Woody Harrelson, Patricia Arquette OPENS: New York City, Los Angeles Dec. 30; WIDE: Jan. 15

Mammas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys. And while you're at it, don't let them grow up to make movies about cowboys either. Especially ones that place them in a pretty Southwestern light and solemnly invite us to contemplate their tragic inability to cope with the modern world.

In The Hi-Lo Country, a young man named Pete (Billy Crudup) goes home to New Mexico after World War II, determined to make a go of it as an independent small-scale rancher. Mostly, however, he watches, awed and complaisant, while his like-minded neighbor Big Boy (Woody Harrelson) proceeds along a mulishly macho course to self-destruction. This includes a feckless involvement with a trashy woman (Patricia Arquette), lots of sullen standing around in bars itching for a fight, and much hoo-hawing contempt for a competitor (Sam Elliott) who lets nothing distract him from building the kind of big operation that changing times require.

When all is finally lost, it's the failure to honor tradition, not the dopiness of clinging to it, that's blamed. Sam Peckinpah, who loved to celebrate bad-boyishness, apparently tried for years to adapt Max Evans' 1961 novel to the screen. It says something about the reach and persistence of decaying myth that British director Stephen Frears, creator of such eccentric delights as My Beautiful Laundrette and The Grifters, has succumbed to it. There's no need to follow his example. --R.S.