JR Woodward :: Blog :: A Look at Brokeness and Healing through Two Classic Films Part I

Introduction
We are broken people living in a broken world, so how should we pursue a sense of wholeness?  How do we find healing? What are we being healed for?  How does our sense of calling in life connect with our ability to find wholeness?  These are a couple of the themes that are addressed in Patch Adams and Good Will Hunting.

Plot Summary of Patch Adams

We meet Hunter Adams in the Psychiatric Institution, where he admits himself after attempting to take his life.  He goes to find healing from the doctors, but instead finds healing through the patients.  He finds healing as he helps the patients, thus earning the nickname “Patch.”  Arthur Mendelson asks Patch a question that sticks with him through the film, “How many fingers do you see?”  Through this question, Arthur helps Patch to focus beyond the problem in order to find solutions.  One of the keys to healing is looking at life from a different perspective.

Two years later Patch finds himself at a Medical Institution to get trained to be a doctor.  While Dean Wilcott and the institution want to “train the humanity” out of the students and make them Doctors, Patch Adams sees a need to bring humanity back into the healing process.  This sets up a major conflict between the institutional way of treating diseases to the Patch Adams way of bringing healing.

In the end, Patch realizes he needs to create a space outside of the institution, in order to bring a sense of healing to people.  As he takes this journey, he is able to dodge the arrows of the institution and endure the loss of the love of his life, because he realizes that wholeness comes when we are willing to lose our life by helping others.

Plot Summary of Good Will Hunting

Will Hunting lives in the tough part of South Boston with his buddies and works as a janitor at M.I.T..  He can solve math problems better than the M.I.T. professors, but has difficulty working through the issues of his own life.

Will is a genius when it comes to book knowledge, but an infant when it comes to understanding himself.  While he can speak about economics, science, history and art better than most people on the planet, he finds himself getting in fights, stealing cars and incapable of building a meaningful relationship with a woman.

He avoids a jail sentence by taking the invitation to work with Professor Lambeau and making a commitment to meet with a therapist.  Sean, the fifth therapist, helps Will to understand that there is much more to life than just book knowledge, and that the way to wholeness is by living, by experiencing, and by making commitments to imperfect people. 

Professor Lambeau wants Will to start thinking about the future and use his gifts to become successful.  Yet Sean, his therapist, wants Will to honestly face his past and find healing first.  As Will honestly works through his past and becomes more whole, he is able to take the risk to follow his heart, and leave his friends and a successful career to explore what it means to follow his passions and pursue life with a soul mate.

In part II I will take a look that the themes and issues these films bring up, and then in part III look at the insights the modernity and postmodernity make on these two films.