director
Jonathan Demme
screenwriter
Ron Nyswaner
producers
Jonathan Demme
Edward Saxon
cinematographer
Tak Fujimoto
music
Howard Shore
editor
Craig McKay
cast
Tom Hanks (Andrew Beckett)
Denzel Washington (Joe Miller)
Roberta Maxwell (Judge Tate)
Karen Finley (Dr. Gillman)
Ron Vawter (Bob Seidman)
Anna Deavere Smith (Anthea Burton)
Joanne Woodward (Sarah Beckett)
Jason Robards (Charles Wheeler)
Robert Ridgely (Walter Kenton)
Antonio Banderas (Miguel Alvarez)
Tracey Walter (Librarian)
Mary Steenburgen (Belinda Conine)
Charles Napier (Judge Garnett)
Roger Corman (Mr. Laird)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 125m
u.s.
release: 12/23/93
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other jonathan
demme films
reviewed on this website:
- the
complex sessions
- the
manchurian candidate (2004)
- the
silence of the lambs
- stop
making sense
- storefront
hitchcock
- swimming
to cambodia
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If they gave awards for good
intentions alone, Jonathan Demme's mantle would be full. His
new film, Philadelphia, is the first mainstream Hollywood
movie about AIDS, and it carries a formidable burden: It's not
every film that risks alienating both gays and homophobes.
Should one preach to the converted, or should one try to win
people over? Demme (who is hetero) and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner
(who is gay) have made Philadelphia with a wide eye towards
the homophobes in the house. The movie is a primer on tolerance,
and it tries to cover so many bases that it wears itself out
dramatically. Yet, despite its general lack of emotional directness,
this is still a moving and honest work, a lucid (if not quite
impassioned) plea for common decency.
Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks),
a rising young lawyer, is closing in on a senior partnership
at his prosperous firm. In the first of several dark ironies,
a lesion appears on Andrew's forehead the day he learns of his
promotion. Andrew has known for some time that he has AIDS, but
his associates (including his boss, played with maximum sleaze
by Jason Robards) don't even know he's gay. Apparently it hasn't
been an issue. But it becomes one. When Andrew's condition grows
too advanced to conceal, one of his files on an important case
suddenly disappears. Though it is eventually recovered, Andrew
is fired for "incompetence."
That Andrew has in fact been
fired for being a gay man with AIDS is obvious to everyone except
Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), an ambulance-chaser and admitted
homophobe. When Andrew taps Joe to represent him in a wrongful-dismissal
suit against the firm, Joe flatly tells him he has no case. "What
happened to you," Joe says, "it's a bitch, but..."
At home with his wife, Joe runs through the standard anti-gay
litany. But when he spots an ailing Andrew at the library, buried
in legal documents and refusing to be talked into "a separate
research room," Joe realizes they have something in common
-- experience with prejudice. And they begin to build Andrew's
case.
Despite this subject's contemporary
urgency, Philadelphia follows a game plan as old as the
written word. Disappointment may set in when you recognize that
this isn't an AIDS movie at all; it's a brotherhood movie, a
semi-Capraesque drama pitting Two Little Guys Against The System.
Yet Demme knows he can't allow himself a Capraesque triumphant
climax: Even if Andrew wins his case, he's still going to die.
Demme and Nyswaner play down the importance of the actual court
verdict, focusing instead on the audience's verdict. The
filmmakers themselves are like attorneys representing Andrew:
they mean to show that their client is a good lawyer and decent
human being who deserves to be treated and respected accordingly.
Any possible homophobic objections are smoothly overruled by
the presence of the nice, presentable, heterosexual Tom Hanks
in the role.
By painting Andrew as a virtually
flawless man with whom straight audiences can identify because
he's "just like them," Jonathan Demme -- atoning, perhaps,
for charges of homophobia levelled against his Silence
of the Lambs* -- undercuts his own message. If Andrew
were a jerk and only moderately competent, would his plight then
be justified? The movie barely permits Andrew anger or even sadness
at his illness or the injustice done to him. At his most passionate,
Andrew weeps at a Maria Callas aria and explains to Joe what
it means to him. It's a powerful scene by itself, but it comes
out of nowhere; Andrew lacks the outsize personality, gay or
straight, that would thrive on the excesses of opera. For most
of the movie, he seems more like a Phil Collins fan.
The Maria Callas scene, which
dramatizes the transporting force of art, throws a harsh light
on the rest of Philadelphia, which derives its power from
its subject, not its art. The actors are game, though. Denzel
Washington stubbornly (and rightly) refuses to give Joe an overnight
awakening; by the end of the movie, you feel that his newfound
sense of fairness has changed Joe both as a lawyer and as a man.
Antonio Banderas gives a beautiful performance, almost entirely
with his eyes, as Andrew's devoted lover Miguel. (Too bad this
couple is more cuddle-bunny than carnal. Banderas, late of Pedro
Almodovar's films, wouldn't have been shy about kissing a man
onscreen.) Tom Hanks does what he can with a big, unwritten role;
he works hard to strip any bathos from his performance, even
when Andrew collapses in the courtroom. With a little help from
the script, Hanks could have drawn on his comic gifts and been
great. I kept thinking of Andy Lippincott, another AIDS-stricken
lawyer, created by Garry Trudeau for his Doonesbury strip.
Lippincott kept himself amused till the end and videotaped himself
so he could be "part of the entertainment" at his own
memorial service; he'd have been a wonderful, funky character
for Hanks to play.
I couldn't help wanting more
from Philadelphia, yet some part of me also wants to applaud
it for having been made at all. Given the sweeping goal it sets
for itself, it probably doesn't have room to be more.
It does avoid potential thorns: Andrew's family doesn't reject
him, and Miguel hardly blinks when it's revealed that Andrew
had sex with a stranger in a gay porn theater years ago (when
he was already involved with Miguel). A whole movie could be
built on either of those issues. Philadelphia uses the
courtroom genre -- always a useful genre to touch lightly on
hot-button topics -- to put a human face to AIDS and homosexuality
for the hetero audience. It's easy to say that it doesn't go
far enough. But the regrettable fact is that the many people
who didn't go see Parting Glances or Longtime Companion
are more likely to see this film -- with its Oscar-winning director,
its known-heterosexual leads, and its big-studio push -- and
to be more affected by its simplistic handling of its subject
than they would be by a more complex rendering. I'm willing to
excuse the compromises Philadelphia makes if its likely
success enables Hollywood to probe the subject of AIDS more deeply
and candidly. Consider this a good start, a baby step in the
right direction.
* Actually, Demme had wanted to make
this film years before he ever laid eyes on Silence of the
Lambs, though it was widely assumed at the time that he was
doing penance for the perceived homophobia inherent in the character
Buffalo Bill. As it happened, some of the louder voices in the
gay community (perhaps still wary of the director who gave us
a serial killer with a poodle named Precious) jeered Philadelphia,
which I feel was a somewhat churlish response -- would they have
preferred Hollywood to continue to ignore AIDS altogether? The
irony is that since this film came out, there simply haven't
been any other major AIDS films (unless you count something
like And the Band Played On, which premiered on HBO, the
generally gay-friendly home of the If These Walls Could Talk
films and The
Laramie Project).
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