PHILADELPHIA
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
Imagine what Jonathan Demme's PHILADELPHIA would be like without Denzel Washington as the homophobic lawyer. As it is, this first major Hollywood movie about AIDS is play-it-safe, respectfully detached, sometimes melodramatic and occasionally false. Without Denzel, it would have been impossibly dreary, stacked, banal. It comes very close to being these things anyway, but as the business card-pushing, TV pitching lawyer, Denzel is the high octane fuel that keeps Demme's motor running. Once Tom Hanks -- as the highly promising lawyer who is fired by his firm for alleged incompetence but much more likely because he has AIDS -- asks Denzel to take the case and refuses, we're in full view of Denzel's bigotry against gays. There's nothing that he says about or how he responds to homosexuals that provide comfort to anyone except uneducated haters. In the movie's pivotal plot-turning sequence, at a public library where Hanks is researching HIV-related discrimination, Denzel happens by chance to also be there and he watches -- hiding behind his own pile of material -- as Hanks, suffering from the outer manifestations of AIDS, is being pressured by a librarian to move out of the general reading area and into a smaller, more private spot. We can see both embarrassment and a whole history's worth of discrimination in Denzel's face, which is puffed out with an unchewed turnover of some kind. His reluctance to help Hanks dissipates as he recognizes that there is, in spite of his bias against gays, an analogy between what Hanks is experiencing and what his own race has and still is going through. This kinship is never discussed, but we can sense how troubling it is for Denzel to accept. As the case proceeds through court, he says to Hanks that his anti-gay feelings are derived from what most of us in the audience know are often exaggerated stereotypes: that gays are people who wear their mothers' clothing; gays are the kind of people who won't fight; are the kind who go after children; are always wanting to get "in your pants." In what is the picture's most moving sequence, Denzel watches a wasting away Hanks "live" out a Maria Callas aria -- "La mama morta" from Giordano's "Andrea Chenier" -- and sees that his fear of gays (and, of course, his FRAIDS) is the result of deliberate ignorance. What is startling is that, once Denzel realizes the extent to which Hanks -- and by extension so many other gays --- have been hiding their sexual orientation as a means of preservation, only to see their privacy being used against them, he charges into the bigoted defendants with bold abandon, challenging them on their own sexuality, hurling raw (even a few fresh) epithets. He zeroes in on what isn't the actual legal but voyeuristic case: what Hanks, or any gay, does in the bedroom. Denzel's lawyer starts at the beginning of PHILADELPHIA as a shyster; by end, he becomes the Black Knight he never knew he was. Had a younger Sidney Poitier performed the part, it would have been hokier than it is and, much worse, condescending, gaggy. The kind of work Denzel Washington does here, and has done in the first half of CRY FREEDOM, and in GLORY and MALCOLM X surpasses anything done by Poitier and rivals Morgan Freeman. And, I think, bests him: Freeman isn't loose enough in front of the camera to work us up emotionally, and without that ability, he's an expert at technique; his icy tightness keeps him from being the inclusive movie actor Washington isn't afraid to be.
Movie politics being what they are dictated Tom Hanks would get the best actor Oscar that Washington should have been nominated for. In the William Hurt-KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN vein, Hanks gets accolades because, as a straight, he plays a role so many others would run away from. With the exception of the marvellous makeup effects, Hanks isn't doing much as an actor that would distinguish him. His most taxing moments, while in the courtroom, tend to tax us as well -- we're waiting rather impatiently for him to get to his transitional point; his halts and self-recognizing bits of physical agony are taking tolls on all of us because he's getting to them inappropriately. This isn't meant to be as cold-hearted as it sounds; Hanks simply isn't playing the strings of the violin as means by which the character unfolds, but as a means to sustain our sympathies. One could debate the timing of Hanks' deterioration: I don't think it belongs in the courtroom, as it belabors with MADAME X dramatics what is already a foregone conclusion. (The jury foreman capsulizes the case perfectly.) The cushion of safety around Hanks isn't reassuring, it's artifice -- paralleling Harold Brodkey's in The New Yorker -- and gay groups protesting the movie for a variety of reasons are right to point out that Hanks avoids his character's preference. There's a clad-in-Navy suits dance, and a kiss of a yellowish hand, and clumsy inferences of gay promiscuity, but it's as if the ghost of William Friedkin's CRUISING and the religious fundamentalists were acting as newly revised Hayes hounds. Hanks has two splendid, heartbreaking moments that grab and shake us: his battle to control, outside Denzel's office, the swelling of the pain of yet another rejection in his quest for justice, and, at the conclusion of the aria by Callas, when the red on the screen returns to normal light, he has the brief, tragic handsome maturity that sometimes comes at certain stages of terminal illness. (Rock Hudson, Brad Davis and Ray Sharkey also showed this.)
PHILADELPHIA, of course, isn't the first film about AIDS. There was, initially, the cable production of the play AS IS, starring Robert Carradine and Jonathan Hadary. Next came Aidan Quinn, Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands in the double-barrelled AN EARLY FROST. American soaps have tackled it, too: "All My Children," "The Young and the Restless," "Days of Our Lives," and though not directly about AIDS, "One Life to Live" dealt with hatred of gays a season or two ago with writing worthy of but was denied Humanitas recognition. Judith Light and Lucas Haas did THE RYAN WHITE STORY. And there's LONGTIME CAMPION, and Julie Andrews and Ann-Margret did a mothers' perspective on their sons' illness in a TV special.. Then HBO brought us AND THE BAND PLAYED ON, the all-star version of Randy Shilts's best seller about scapegoating that I've thus far successfully managed to avoid. I did catch ROOMATES, which provided Randy Quaid with a powerful, horribly scary moment of absolute fear (when there's a knock at the door and he drops the towels). And I caught USA's A MOTHER'S PRAYER with Linda Hamilton really pushing it. It's probably true that Demme wouldn't have been able to make PHILADELPHIA as a mainstreamer had he included scenes that showed homosexual coupling, yet isn't it hypocritical of him to shy away from the very realities requesting our tolerance after getting audiences to cheer on a cannibal? Leaving the theatre, I heard a woman remark to another, "Lawyers -- they're all scum, aren't they?" That may be the more honest reaction to Demme's soft-headed proselytizing. The script is chock full of holes, but the one question I'd like answered is about the casting of Joanne Woodward's husband: Is he meant to be a liberal Marlin Fitzwater?
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