"Philadelphia": review

Tom Hanks (L) and Denzel Washington (R)

[WARNING: spoilers for an old movie.]

I finally reached way back into the past to see "Philadelphia," a film for which Tom Hanks won a Best Actor Oscar. Singer Bruce Springsteen also won an Oscar for his original song "Streets of Philadelphia," which plays as the movie opens. The 1993 work was directed by Jonathan Demme ("Silence of the Lambs") and written by Ron Nyswaner; it starred Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Jason Robards, and Mary Steenburgen. It was also inspired by two real-life lawyers with AIDS who got fired from their firms: Geoffrey Bowers and Clarence Cain.

Andrew Beckett (Hanks) is a hotshot lawyer for Wyant, Wheeler, Hellerman, Tetlow, and Brown. Beckett is fired from his position, presumably because one of the law-firm partners discovered that Beckett was a homosexual sick with AIDS, although the law firm itself contends that he has been fired due to incompetence. After asking nine other lawyers to take his wrongful-termination case, Beckett finally approaches Joe Miller (Washington), who is at first hesitant to help Beckett fight his former employers. Much of the film revolves around the court case while also tracking Andrew's steadily deteriorating condition. Would I be spoiling things, given how old the film now is (it turns 30 next year), if I noted that Beckett wins his case but dies soon after his victory?

Watching a 1993 film from a 2022 perspective means I'm judging this movie as a 53-year-old man who has seen a lot of movies and watched how they have evolved, since 1993, in terms of pacing, cinematography, acting style, musical score, and all the rest. "Philadelphia" has a very 90s feel to it, and since AIDS didn't blow up as a national/global crisis until the 80s (i.e., back when I was a kid, as fellow students told AIDS jokes without really understanding what AIDS was), it's safe to say that, by 1993, people were still feeling fairly awkward about AIDS and homosexuality. As a result, Hollywood, in its eternal struggle for relevance, was rather heavy-handed in its messaging about this issue, and in "Philadelphia," that translates to an earnest, beat-you-over-the-head tone that, at times, threatens to detract from the story.

At the same time, the movie confronts the issue of AIDS as either a lifestyle disease of choice (in the case of gays and lesbians who insist on having sex) or a disease of misfortune (as when people contract the disease through blood transfusions). We now know the issue is more complex than this binary, but I give the movie credit for being smart enough to at least attempt to explore multiple perspectives. Andrew Beckett doesn't come off as a total angel: while on the stand and testifying on his own behalf, he is obliged to admit to hiding his condition from his bosses, and to engaging in anonymous sexual activities in gay cinemas while he was in a relationship with his lover Miguel (Antonio Banderas). But Andrew also testifies that, as a sexually active gay man, he had heard about AIDS in the 1980s, but he didn't understand its implications, so it wasn't a simple matter of him "choosing AIDS," so to speak. The movie also shows us how Joe Miller, no fan of homosexuals, has to overcome his own prejudices while he serves as Andrew's counsel.

Tom Hanks deserved his Oscar, I think, for his performance as Andrew Beckett. Hanks said, in his Oscar speech, that he wanted to share his acting award with Denzel Washington, whose performance was also incredible and easily deserving of an Oscar. Special mention should go to Mary Steenburgen in the role of opposing counsel Belinda Conine. I've long had a bit of a crush on ol' Mary, and that warm-fuzzy feeling didn't go away despite her role as one of the film's sort-of bad guys. Jason Robards can always be relied on to put in a great performance, and his Charles Wheeler—one of the founding partners of his firm—is a formidable old lion, articulate and irascible.

The musical soundtrack for the film involved opera in one crucial scene (Andrea Chénier, libretto by Umberto Giordano, and sung in the scene by Maria Callas), but as the credits were rolling, I saw there was a ton of Mozart laced throughout the movie. The original score was done by none other than Howard Shore, the man behind the impressive Lord of the Rings soundtrack. You can hear hints, in the 1993 film, of what is to come when Lord of the Rings hits theaters in 2001. But while much of Shore's score was beautiful and poignant, some of it felt almost intrusive, perhaps another trait of 90s films. There were moments in the movie when I thought silence would have served better than a musical score. But that's a minor complaint. How can anyone rail against Howard Shore?

Director Demme's camera work proves to be a little strange at times. There's this thing he does where he has his actors look straight into the lens, putting you, the viewer, in the position of the person being looked at. The effect is at times creepy and discomfiting. It happens often enough, throughout the film, for me to know it's a deliberate move on Demme's part, although I sometimes had trouble figuring out what Demme was trying to convey. Earnestness? Conviction? Intense focus? All I can say is that a few of those scenes are uncomfortable.

There's also a sequence in the movie that feels a little jarring: Joe Miller seems to have a "road to Damascus" moment regarding his own homophobia, but how this happens is unclear. In one scene, a football player and law student attempts to hit on Joe inside a convenience store, and Joe becomes incensed, using terms like faggot and asshole to describe the student as Joe beats a hasty retreat. A short time later, we see Joe in court, piously lecturing the courtroom about our prejudices. So Joe's "road to Damascus" moment is never actually shown; we have to intuit that it happened. It would have been better to show Joe's change in attitude more explicitly and gradually.

"Philadelphia" ends after Andrew Beckett's death: the final scene, from his wake, shows a grainy video of Andrew as a little kid—young, innocent, and full of life. While I didn't weep at the scene, I thought it was a fitting and sentimental way to end the film, a reminder of who Andrew used to be before all of this tragedy.

And maybe it was timely to watch a movie about what was (and arguably may still be) a global pandemic while we're still in the midst of the current COVID pandemic. As the movie shows, plenty of people had no idea how to act around those known to have AIDS, and the reflex was to shun and marginalize the infected. The film shows us people who instinctively move away from objects touched by Andrew, or who hesitate at shaking Andrew's hand, or who move away from him in a library when they overhear that he's doing research for an AIDS-discrimination case. A lot of that same paranoia and superstition motivates people's actions these days despite the ready availability of scientific information (which itself took a long time to come out given how politically driven the public conversation has been). So even today, "Philadelphia" can be seen as a relevant film.

In all, the movie has its heart in the right place, and I think it may have represented something of a cultural moment for America at large back in 1993. It was a bit too earnest, in the way that Hollywood can often be too earnest (think about how Hollywood tried to apologize to Vietnam vets, after years of Baby killer!, by producing an embarrassing slew of action movies that were POW extraction fantasies), but it paved the way for later films that have dealt with AIDS and "alternative lifestyles," per the phrase Joe Miller uses in the film. We're in a better, calmer place, now, when it comes to AIDS, which still doesn't have a cure but is controllable. I can only hope that we will also soon calm down about COVID. Meanwhile, though the movie isn't subtle with its larger messaging, it is whispering something, at least subtextually, about the need for all of us to treat each other with more human warmth and less paranoia.

Did Andrew Beckett doom himself by living his particular lifestyle? The movie has the courage to entertain the possibility that the answer is yes. At the same time, the movie tries to tell us that the other side of the coin is that we need to show compassion and mercy to the afflicted in the name of our common humanity. Outreach is better than retreat.