There’s a short list of filmmakers who swept the Oscars and got the keys to the castle. Most recently, Sean Baker managed to win more Oscars than Walt Disney for his Anora; behind him are the Daniels, Coen Brothers, James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis, Steven Spielberg, Jonathan Demme, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, and John Ford. Demme sticks out, and although The Silence of the Lambs is still widely recognized as a classic film, every time I look at it again it looks shoddier, with buzzed focus and unsteady dolly movements, not to mention the flat lighting and mostly non-distinct compositions. The much-lauded use of point of view shots between Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) and her male superiors is effective and appropriately utilized, but it’s the only thing that makes Demme’s films noticeably his. In his follow-up, 1993’s Philadelphia, at least 25 percent of the shots in the entire film are point of view; it works when Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks) is talking to his homophobic superiors who eye him nervously, convinced that Beckett has AIDS before he has any idea. Early in the film, one older partner at Beckett’s law firm notices a lesion, and the camera does a dramatic dolly-in on Beckett’s forehead, along with a string cue telling us to be afraid.
Demme may have never left the Corman school on a technical level, but that can only diminish Silence of the Lambs so much—it’s a great movie, one you can sit and watch. His “I can do anything” moment was Philadelphia, the first studio film to deal directly with AIDS, and one of very few to treat gay people with dignity and respect. Already a decade into the pandemic, misapprehensions about the disease and how it transmits were still prevalent, and Demme wanted to make a huge movie that played in malls and address homophobia. The only way to pull that off is movie stars, and Philadelphia is both barrels: Tom Hanks as a man with AIDS and Denzel Washington as his homophobic lawyer, both “destroying their careers” according to their agents at the peak of their careers. When Hanks first comes to Washington’s office, there are a number of insert shots of everything Hanks touches, Washington panicked that he could get AIDS by breathing the same air.
Washington initially turns down the case, “for personal reasons,” and he goes home to his wife and newborn baby to make it clear that “Yes, I’m homophobic! I don’t like gay people.” His wife tells him about one of her cousins who happens to be gay. “Her?! She’s gay? How long has she known?” His wife laughs. “Probably ever since she can remember.” Washington only takes on Hanks’ case when he sees him pressured to leave the library against his wishes because of nervous nearby readers. They quickly become friendly, but Washington’s homophobia sticks around; when a man tries to pick him up in a pharmacy, Washington loses it and screams his way out of the store. During the trial, he erupts into a homophobic tirade as a strategic move, baffling everyone in the courtroom. But Hanks does win his suit, and Washington proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Hanks’ law firm illegally fired him because he had AIDS.
Philadelphia is prime “Oscar bait,” made before the term existed and certainly one of its key inspirations. Although it became a cliché for movie stars to play dying, disabled, or ugly, before 1993 no one on Hanks’ level had the guts to play this modern tragedy. I’m sure it hit millions of people like a comet to see Hanks getting weaker and weaker as his case grows stronger; in pop culture, there are few performances that had as much of a positive effect on the public consciousness as Hanks in Philadelphia.
Jonathan Rosenbaum ended his December 1, 1993 review for the Chicago Reader with the following: “Clearly, this 1993 movie isn’t for people who know anyone with AIDS; it’s for people who know people who know people who know people with AIDS.” That’s the point, dumbass. When Demme asked Bruce Springsteen for a title song, he said he wanted something that “would be playing in malls.” Springsteen delivered the self-produced “Streets of Philadelphia,” a gorgeous and haunting piece of music that has more in common with Madonna’s “Justify My Love” than any of his other songs. Philadelphia is a mass-market movie, one made primarily for homophobes less far gone than Jason Robards’ vile senior partner. It wouldn’t work with a star dimmer than Hanks. Andrew Beckett could’ve been played by Matthew Modine, Michael Keaton, Johnny Depp, John Cusack, Kevin Kline, or Jeff Daniels, and while they may have worked, none of them would achieve the same effect. None of them are the “guy” (kid) from Big. Just a year later, Hanks starred in Forrest Gump, one of the most appalling films ever made, the Boomer Birth of a Nation, but it doesn’t diminish the power of his performance in Philadelphia, as vulnerable and real as Gump is insulting and disingenuous.
Movie stars learned to face certain death and insurmountable tragedy after Hanks won consecutive Best Actor Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump in the mid-1990s, Oscar bait started to take shape as a genre. More and more movie stars got AIDS, lived with AIDS, died from AIDS, went to prison, escaped prison, died in prison, and became mentally disabled: Dead Man Walking, A Beautiful Mind, Sling Blade, I Am Sam, The Hours, and Brokeback Mountain were all feted and at least nominated, although Brokeback Mountain was famously rejected by the academy in favor of Paul Haggis’ Magnolia rip-off, 2004’s Crash, which was somehow eligible for the 2006 Oscars ceremony.
Blame it on Clint Eastwood, Tony Curtis, and other people in the industry who refused to honor the “gay cowboy movie,” a premise predicted by Trey Parker and Matt Stone just six years before. Their Team America: World Police spoofed actors and disease spectacles with Lease, a parody of 1990s Broadway sensation Rent, introduced with a song featuring our lead marionette, “Everyone Has AIDS.” By 2004, the joke worked because the casual homophobia depicted in Philadelphia was greatly diminished; although many remained in the closet, gay people were no longer considered active threats and vectors of disease in public (an in-between ethos perhaps best described in Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy). AIDS research and treatment were also drastically better in the 2000s, rendering some of the attitudes and anxieties of the people in Philadelphia particularly striking today.
Demme’s an overrated filmmaker, but even his ill-considered camera moves and junky drive-in transitions don’t diminish the grand gesture that is Philadelphia. Defying conventions of Oscar bait to come, Hanks’ family is supportive from the beginning, although Martha Frankel took issue with this in Artforum’s December 1994 issue: “Don’t be so politically correct. If Philadelphia were the story of an average AIDS patient, the guy would’ve died alone, without health insurance, and no smiling Joanne Woodward to cheer him up.” Again, THAT’S THE POINT! The movie needs smiling Joanne Woodward to be there for her son from the beginning to the end, when he’s dying in the hospital. Everyone in his life comes to see him, including Washington. Hanks, barely conscious, leaves off with a joke: “What do you call four lawyers chained to the bottom of the ocean?” “What?” “A good start.” Washington repeats the joke in the elevator moments later to two strangers, and the three are amused for a moment.
Philadelphia is full of grace notes and unexpected choices that amount to a film that’s powerful and often overwhelming. It remains a considerable piece of work three decades on, a film that never panders or cajoles its audiences into taking on or understanding its “message.” Philadelphia isn’t a message movie; it’s a movie about famous people in real situations which remind us that they too are real—they can die. According to Demme, Hanks’ agent was mortified that his client wanted the part, especially since “price was no object;” when Washington was misreported as the actor playing Andrew Beckett, he received endless phone calls and messages from friends, fans, and business partners who, would “never see another Denzel Washington movie ever again.” Both actors knew they were putting themselves and their careers on the line, even if they knew from Silence of the Lambs that the film itself would be good. On that level, Philadelphia gains its most resonant layer, a dream of benevolent Hollywood changing the world for the better finally realized.
Among Demme’s films, Philadelphia is under-discussed today, assumed to be cloying Oscar bait by people who haven’t seen it and people who don’t remember seeing it. To be fair, it’s of the mold so ruthlessly parodied by Parker and Stone, along with Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington’s repulsive On Cinema, but while it has all the signs of a self-serving liberal fantasy, Philadelphia remains unconventional, often surprising, and with remarkably few false notes. It’s Demme’s best work by a mile.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM