Philadelphia
Directed by Jonathan Demme
Starring Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Jason Robards
Reviewed by Russell Pink
Since the AIDS pandemic began, more aware or bolder film producers have noticed the potential of the screen for enlarging public awareness on the issue. This has usually meant a result on television rather than the big screen, not well funded and with no important actors to give it billing. Most of the attempts concentrate on the sentimentality of death and dying rather than the politics of AIDS.
In the USA, over 70% of AIDS sufferers have been gay men, many of whom might agree with Randy Shilts in his book And the band played on that society endorsed the Reagan-Bush regime's lack of action on a major epidemic because it attacked an un-American, undesirable minority anyway.
In the wake of Bush, a more tolerant, pluralist USA seems to be arising, and with it the possibility of a film that looks at more than the surface of gay life. Hence, Philadelphia, a script taken on by director Jonathan Demme, who had lost a close artist friend from AIDS.
Radical activists like Larry Kramer attacked the film on first showing, for doing several things badly or inauthentically, the lightly sketched relationship of main character Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks) and his lover Miguel (Antonio Banderas), the strong family support for Beckett's condition, the emotion that runs amok sometimes.
But as a gay political man wrote the script for a middle-class audience and it required straight men as leads to get backing, these aspects become understandable. In Philadelphia we meet head-on the uninformed hatred of gay people, misconceptions about AIDS and the hell of an individual living with it.
The setting is wryly symbolic; Philadelphia, "the city of brotherly love", is supposedly known for its fairness and decency. The unsurprising plot involves a group of lawyer executives who fire one of their pet juniors because they suspect he will not be around much longer; one of them has noted a supposed lesion on Beckett's face.
The upshot is a long courtroom drama with Denzel Washington playing Joe Miller, Beckett's counsel. What is different from earlier court dramas on public issues is the focus on life outside as well as in the court. By this, we get to know the complexity of living with AIDS, and the subjective feelings of those with it.
Demme, however, ultimately appeals to a wider sense of how we take dignity and rights from other human beings in many situations. The film begins to examine ethical questions beyond just AIDS or gay issues. One of them would be: "Why do we have in-groups and out-groups?" Another is: "How can good people watch injustice being done and not speak out?"
Washington's skilful acting brings out the slow transformation of a man confronted with such issues. His reluctant change from anti-gay suburban macho husband into a caring defender of a maligned minority is the best aspect of Philadelphia.
Women of the film are significant, although not prominent in dialogue. This applies most to Beckett's mother, acting veteran Joanne Woodward, who evokes painful identification with the close relatives of AIDS patients. Thus, exclusive concern with the gay relationship is avoided in favour of drawing on a viewer's own experience of rejection, frailty and loss.
Where the film falters is in points like the overdone music score that may just be another Demme trick, but which misses. The too contrived symbolic scene of Beckett in ecstasy over a Maria Callas aria could have been cut by some minutes, and the prosecution female lawyer attempts things too nasty to believe.