For whatever reason, though, in the years since "The Fisher King," Williams has taken it as his personal mission to make people "happy" in the most pedestrian and clumsy ways imaginable -- from playing a man-child in "Jack" (1996) to his role in a forthcoming project called "Taxi Dog," about a New York cabbie who befriends a homeless dog named Maxi. Williams' problems with drugs and philandering during the '80s were well-covered in the press; perhaps he's trying to atone for his sins by making mawkish family pictures with no sense of shame. Now he's a one-man Times Square, squeaky clean and safe even for tourists.

"Mrs. Doubtfire" seemed to usher in a new era for Williams. The picture was a tremendous hit, a gaily packaged laugh riot with a nice little moral about the importance of keeping families together, something you could take the kids to on a Saturday afternoon. Kids supposedly cotton to the character of Mrs. Doubtfire, but she scares the hell out of me: Her face is rendered almost immobile by strata of latex and pancake makeup, and her nasolabial fold is simply nonexistent -- creepy. Her relentlessly twinkly blue eyes are the only place I can see Williams in her. It's as if he's been swallowed by a pod lady. This is fun for kids?

"Patch Adams," about a doctor who believes in treating his patients with humor as well as medicine (and based on a true story), is marginally more enjoyable, but again Williams kicks his mugging and sermonizing into high gear. I disliked "Patch Adams," but when Williams was allowed to be Williams-trapped-in-the-body-of-Patch-Adams, I laughed. As when, trying to woo a fellow medical student, he half hides himself behind a skeleton and waves its arm enthusiastically, calling out, "Donner, party of 50!" (Similarly, in "Mrs. Doubtfire" he briefly tried on a number of disguises, from a yenta in a babushka to Barbra Streisand, and these miniature cameos were delightful.) Williams is funniest when he's riffing, but that's not exactly acting. In fact, it's not the "new" Williams himself that I dislike -- I still enjoy his zaniness, his spontaneous bursts of inventiveness. It's Williams' trying to soothe the psyches of the people -- smoothing out all his rough edges until there's nothing left but slick surface -- that's so difficult to deal with.

Williams has a speech in "Patch Adams" that's telling, revealing something of the questionable motives of even seemingly generous performers. Patch explains to the woman he's wooing why he decided to become a doctor: "I tried to kill myself. The mental ward was the best thing that ever happened to me ... It helped me realize that by helping [the other patients] I could forget about my own problems. And I did ... I really helped some of them. It was an incredible feeling."

Purely intentionally, of course, Williams has just drawn what seems like a neat little parallel between people who work in the medical and entertainment fields. Sure, there's generosity involved both in making people laugh and in saving their lives. But beyond that, the comparison is shaky. Doctors, like entertainers, may now and then get that "incredible feeling" from helping people, and they may feel deeply satisfied by their work; but ultimately they have to be less interested in making themselves feel good, and more motivated by a sense of duty to their patients.

Williams' pronouncement, made through the ventriloquist's dummy of the excessively smiley Patch Adams, is less about helping people than it is about going after his own happy glow. There's a selfish high that comes with entertaining people, and it's not an entirely bad kind of selfishness -- a performer can't give endessly without getting something in return.

But pleasing an audience is different from feeding on its approval. Williams used to know how to move an audience in the subtlest ways, with a look or a gesture or a line reading. Giving that kind of pleasure is a calling of sorts; it's not the sort of thing every performer can do, and Williams -- one of the lucky few who had the knack -- seems to have foregone it completely. Mrs. Doubtfire may have been scary. But Dr. Williams, with his magic vitamin for feeling good, is downright depressing.

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