A "Philadelphia" Retrospective

Philadelphia (1993) has rarely been judged as a movie in itself; it was judged as merely a step forward (perhaps too little too late for Hollywood) or a failed attempt at propaganda, depending on your political views. The closest we get to a judgement of it as a work of art, rather than as a social campaign, is exemplified in brief comments like Roger Ebert’s: “Philadelphia is quite a good film, on its own terms.” Mostly it was analyzed with the ongoing AIDS crisis starkly in focus, and oftentimes it was compared, usually favorably, with other Hollywood movies; Ebert likened it to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), a film which dramatized a white family coming to accept a woman’s black boyfriend. He called Philadelphia a “righteous first step.”

Tom Hanks plays Andrew Beckett, a lawyer at a high power law firm, who has just been made partner and given a case with the firm’s most important client by Charles Wheeler, head of the firm. When one of the other partners notices a lesion on Beckett’s forehead and determines he has AIDS, an important document goes mysteriously missing. Andy is subsequently fired for the supposed oversight. When Andy – suspecting he’s actually been fired for his illness – decides to sue his old firm, the only lawyer in town who will take his case is the homophobic ambulance chaser Joe Miller (played by Denzel Washington). As the case progresses, we glimpse more of Andy’s personal and family life. The night that he learns he has won his case, Andy dies in the hospital.

Perhaps a better comparison than Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner would be To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) – both are courtroom dramas that appeal to white liberal sympathies; both star charismatic white actors (Hanks and Peck) to make their messages more palatable to a presumably hostile segment of the audience; and both sideline the othering aspects of their story. Mockingbird denies both voice and agency to its black characters, instead choosing to center its story on the white lawyer. Philadelphia, while one of its two main characters is gay and has AIDS, takes great pains to normalize Andy; he is kind, charming, hardworking, and has a good relationship with his family. Scenes of intimacy between Andy and his boyfriend were also reportedly removed for the theatrical cut, to avoid “grossing out” audiences (one scene, of them lying in bed together, was added back to the DVD version).

Still, the comparison feels unfair to Philadelphia, which makes the more deft use of its courtroom setting and has a more sensitive portrayal of the tragedy it depicts. Philadelphia has flashes of brilliance, even against the hackneyed backdrop that, as contemporary commentators were right to note, was likely responsible for the film’s existence in the first place. The film must then toggle between the comforting – to both audience and studio executives, no doubt – familiarity of the courtroom drama, and its far subtler, if still obligatory, human drama.

A traditional courtroom drama forms the backbone of the story, for good reason: courtroom dramas are perfectly suited to arouse sympathy. The rigid conventions of the courtroom drama allow the filmmaking to deny any complexity to the villains of our story, a complexity which might edge sympathy away from Andy and towards them. In one scene, the partners of the firm walk down a dark hallway, shot from behind by director Jonathan Demme, their grandiose villainy made obvious solely by the filmmaking. They stop, and we turn to them, looking up at their faces as Wheeler bellows to a younger lawyer, “He brought AIDS into our offices – into our men’s room!” Demme and writer Ron Nyswaner even have them making vulgar jokes in comically on-the-nose supervillain cigar clubs, while they're at it. Andy is made our hero practically by default.

The courtroom, however, offers much more than just an opportunity for cheap characterization of our villains (which is, admittedly, par for the course for legal dramas – see Mockingbird and The Rainmaker for canonical examples). It offers an avenue for a literal debate of the ethical considerations in the AIDS crisis. Opinions which were widely circulating – Pat Buchanan was not far from public opinion in declaring that gays “have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution” – could be tackled head on, with the opposing counsel already at an emotional disadvantage. (For that is something all good courtroom dramas recognize; the film wins by the emotion it manages to impart.) The jury acts as an audience stand-in, allowing the film to make emotional appeals and present evidence to them directly. This is why so many of our morality tales take place in the guise of the courtroom drama.

The courtroom scenes nonetheless constitute the weaker parts of the film. They are paint-by-numbers filmmaking at times, despite Demme’s and Nyswaner’s attempts to insert traces of originality. By following the expectations of a courtroom drama exactly, the film makes its message seem trite. In reaching for a crass emotionality they only debase the issue. Realizing this, the film smartly shifts focus in the second half by forefronting Andy’s declining health and his moving relationship with his family. By the time his courtroom victory happens, the real jury is already won over.

The content of these scenes are equally as expected as the courtroom element, but here the artfulness of the filmmaking gets room to breathe. For example, there is the inevitable conversion scene: Joe must learn to respect Andy and lose his prejudice, his legal battle for fame and money must become a genuine search for justice. But its execution is more sensitive than most and is easily the most arresting scene in the movie. Demme places the characters in intimate close-ups as they go over the case in Andy’s apartment after a party. They are separated both emotionally and by the framing; Joe resists Andy’s personal questions, trying to keep him on business. Andy’s favorite aria comes on. “La Mamma Morta.” He ambles around the apartment, IV drip in tow, eyes closed, while the camera glides above him. As the singer crescendos Andy is bathed in red, translating her lament for Joe while crying softly. It ends, and as Joe leaves, he hears the opera begin again. He considers knocking, but decides to walk away, smiling as he does. By the time he gets home and holds his baby and wife, it has already happened.

The film is often faulted for two facts about it: who made it and who it stars. For a virus which disproportionately affected gay and black men – which it still does, black men in particular – to be written and directed by two straight white men feels like a cynical marketing move at best, a cheat to those most impacted at worst. While this was not unusual for the time – Rent’s (1993) cast was also mostly white, and even Paris Is Burning (1990) had a white director – it does still feel wrong. What is at issue here is not just representation, but the very depiction of life with AIDS. In both Rent and Philadelphia, for example, those suffering from the virus have for the most part a distinctively upper-class and white experience with AIDS. Andy is never depicted as short on money, has a supportive relationship with his family and boyfriend, and until his infection is revealed he is able to pass comfortably as straight. The mostly black and latino subjects of Paris Is Burning clearly lead very different types of lives, and the depiction of AIDS changes for it. I don’t have to say which is more faithful in its depiction of most AIDS victims, or more tragic.

But sacrifices had to be made for the film to even exist, and for the goal of the filmmakers to be achieved. “We wanted to reach the people who couldn’t care less about people with AIDS,” Demme recalled; Paris Is Burning didn’t make $206 million at the box office. And, small a gesture as it may be, 53 extras in the film were diagnosed AIDS victims. Philadelphia inhabits what Tarkovsky called “Cinema’s equivocal position between art and industry,” a balance which still exists, perhaps even more so now in the age of conglomeration, declining theater ticket sales, and relatively safe superhero blockbusters. If the films of today are braver than Philadelphia was, it is only because the line between profitability and art has shifted with us.