Philadelphia
PG-13, 119 m., 1994
Tom Hanks (Andrew Beckett), Denzel Washington (Joe Miller), Mary Steenburgen (Belinda Conine), Jason Robards (Charles Wheeler), Charles Glenn (Kenneth Killcoyne), Antonio Banderas (Miguel Alvarez), Robert Ridgely (Walter Kenton). Directed by Jonathan Demme and produced by Edward Saxon and Demme. Screenplay by Ron Nyswaner.
More than a decade after AIDS was first identified as a disease, Philadelphia marks the first time Hollywood has risked a big-budget film on the subject. No points for timeliness here; made-for-TV docudramas and the independent film Longtime Companion have already explored the subject, and Philadelphia breaks no new dramatic ground. Instead, it relies on the safe formula of the courtroom drama to add suspense and resolution to a story that, by its nature, should have little suspense and only one possible outcome.
And yet Philadelphia is quite a good film, on its own terms. And for moviegoers with an antipathy to AIDS but an enthusiasm for stars like Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, it may help to broaden understanding of the disease. It’s a ground-breaker like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), the first major film about an interracial romance; it uses the chemistry of popular stars in a reliable genre to sidestep what looks like controversy.
The story involves Hanks as Andrew Beckett, a skillful lawyer in a big, old-line Philadelphia law firm. We know, although at first the law firm doesn’t, that Beckett has AIDS. Visits to the hospital are part of his routine. Charles Wheeler, the senior partner (Jason Robards), hands Beckett a case involving the firm’s most important client, and then, a few days later, another lawyer notices on Beckett’s forehead the telltale blemishes of the skin cancer associated with AIDS.
Beckett is yanked off the case and informed he doesn’t have a future with the firm. He suspects he’s being fired for being sick. He’s correct. (Wheeler, feeling somehow contaminated by association, barks to an associate, “He brought AIDS into our offices—into our men’s room!”) Beckett determines to take a stand and sue the law firm. But his old firm is so powerful that no attorney in Philadelphia wants to take it on, until Beckett finally goes in desperation to Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), one of those lawyers who advertises on TV, promising to save your driver’s license.
Miller doesn’t like homosexuals, but agrees to take the case, mostly for the money and exposure. And then the story falls into the familiar patterns of a courtroom confrontation, with Mary Steenburgen playing the counsel for the old firm. (Her character has no appetite for what is obviously a fraudulent defense, and whispers “I hate this case!” to a member of her team.)
The screenplay by Ron Nyswaner works subtly to avoid the standard clichés of the courtroom. Even as the case is progressing, the film’s center of gravity switches from the trial to the progress of Beckett’s disease, and we briefly meet his lover (Antonio Banderas) and his family, most especially his mother (Joanne Woodward), whose role is small but supplies two of the most powerful moments in the film. By the time the trial reaches its conclusion, the predictable outcome serves mostly as counterpoint for the movie’s real ending.
The film was directed by Jonathan Demme, who with Nyswaner finds original ways to deal with some of the inevitable developments of their story. For example, it’s obvious that at some point the scales will fall from the eyes of the Washington character, and he’ll realize that his prejudices against homosexuals are wrong; he’ll be able to see the Hanks character as a fellow human worthy of affection and respect. Such changes of heart are obligatory (see, for example, Spencer Tracy’s acceptance of Sidney Poitier in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner).
But Philadelphia doesn’t handle that transitional scene with lame dialogue or soppy extrusions of sincerity. Instead, in a brilliant and original scene, Hanks plays an aria from his favorite opera, one he identifies with in his dying state. Washington isn’t an opera fan, but as the music plays and Hanks talks over it, passionately explaining it, Washington undergoes a conversion of the soul. What he sees, finally, is a man who loves life and does not want to leave it. And then the action cuts to Washington’s home, late at night, as he stares sleeplessly into the darkness, and we understand what he is feeling.
Scenes like that are not only wonderful, but frustrating, because they suggest what the whole movie could have been like if the filmmakers had taken a leap of faith. But then the film might not have been made at all; the reassuring rhythms of the courtroom drama, I imagine, are what made this material palatable to the executives in charge of signing the checks.
Philadelphia is a good movie, and sometimes more than that, and the Hanks performance (which, after all, really exists outside the plot) won him the Oscar as best actor. Sooner or later, Hollywood had to address one of the most important subjects of our time, and with Philadelphia the ice was broken.
The Right Stuff
PG, 193 m., 1983
Sam Shepard (Chuck Yeager), Ed Harris (John Glenn), Fred Ward (Gus Grissom), Dennis Quaid (Gordon Cooper), Scott Glenn (Alan Shepard), Barbara Hershey (Glennis Yeager), Mary Jo Deschanel (Annie Glenn), Pamela Reed (Trudy Cooper). Directed by Philip Kaufman and produced by Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff. Screenplay by Kaufman, based on the book by Tom Wolfe.
At the beginning of The Right Stuff, a cowboy reins in his horse and regards a strange sight in the middle of the desert: the X-1 rocket plane, built to break the sound barrier. At the end of the film, the seven Mercury astronauts are cheered in the Houston Astrodome at a Texas barbecue thrown by Lyndon B. Johnson. The contrast between those two images contains the message of The Right Stuff, I think, and the message is that Americans still have the right stuff, but we’ve changed our idea of what it is.
The original American heroes were loners. The cowboy is the perfect example. He was silhouetted against the horizon and he rode into town by himself and if he had a sidekick, the sidekick’s job was to admire him. The new American heroes are team players. No wonder Westerns aren’t made much anymore; cowboys don’t play on teams. The cowboy at the beginning of The Right Stuff is Chuck Yeager, the legendary lone-wolf test pilot who survived the horrifying death rate among early test pilots (more than sixty were killed in a single month) and did fly the X-1 faster than the speed of sound. The movie begins with that victory, and then moves on another ten years to the day when the Russians sent up Sputnik, and the Eisenhower administration hustled to get back into the space race.
The astronauts who eventually rode the first Mercury capsules into space may not have been that much different from Chuck Yeager. As they’re portrayed in the movie, anyway, Gus Grissom, Scott Carpenter, and Gordon Cooper seem to have some of the same stuff as Yeager. But the astronauts were more than pilots; they were a public-relations image, and the movie shows sincere, smooth-talking John Glenn becoming their unofficial spokesman. The X-1 flew in secrecy, but the Mercury flights were telecast, and we were entering a whole new era, the selling of space. There was a lot going on, and there’s a lot going on in the movie, too. The Right Stuff is an adventure film, a special-effects film, a social commentary, and a satire. That the writer-director, Philip Kaufman, is able to get so much into a little more than three hours is impressive. That he also has organized this material into one of the best recent American movies is astonishing. The Right Stuff gives itself the freedom to move around in moods and styles, from a broadly based lampoon of government functionaries to Yeager’s spare, taciturn manner and Glenn’s wonderment at the sights outside his capsule window.