“Ain’t no angel gonna greet me”: “Philadelphia”

Philadelphia served as the mainstream culture’s touchstone for AIDS awareness and sympathy, while at the same time opening itself up for criticisms by the gay community, the far left, and the religious right. That signals that the film was trying to be all things to all people, and that’s true. And while it’s also true that each of those groups’ criticisms were valid—and I’ll discuss them shortly—the film does fit in with Jonathan Demme’s other films, even as it serves as a slight departure from his earlier, more idiosyncratic and less “worthy” work.

The film was made in the wake of The Silence of the Lambs, a film that became surprisingly lauded for what was essentially an adaptation of a trashy pulp novel by Thomas Harris. Prior to that, Demme’s career had been made up of idiosyncratic and sympathetic examinations of goofballs (Melvin and Howard, Something Wild) and smaller, personal projects in documentary (Stop Making Sense, Swimming to Cambodia).After the financial and Oscar  success of Silence, Demme was considered an “important” director, and presumably wanted to maintain that cachet, and Philadelphia offered the chance to direct a film with follow-up awards potential.

Whether or not Demme was that calculated about his career is up for debate—although Philadelphia shows a more “serious” advancement in his filmmaking, insofar as the public may not have taken his more idiosyncratic work seriously, it also shows loyalty to his roots in the casting of Jason Robards, Mary Steenburgen, Ron Vawter, Charles Napier, and even his old producing mentor Roger Corman, as well as following his musical trajectory by culling signature soundtrack pieces by Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young, who he would chronicle in his subsequent documentary Heart of Gold.

Silence had opened Demme up for criticism in the gay community, as some believed that film’s killer, the cross-dressing Buffalo Bill, represented a sterotypical affiliation of homosexuality with psychosis. That accusation may have some merit on dramatic terms—it’s possible a psychotic fag is scarier than just a psychotic—but I’m not convinced that’s what Demme intended. For one, the film was an adaptation; and prior to Philadelphia, Demme had been sitting on a chance to direct a film version of the play Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, a theater piece about the two very different gay men who were similar only in their homosexuality and death from AIDS. The play was created by Ron Vawter, who was gay and had AIDS, and who had starred in Silence and was also cast in Philadelphia, and who was one of the founding members of the Wooster Group, along with Spalding Gray, who was the subject of Demme’s documentary, Swimming to Cambodia.

The criticisms from the left were of Philadelphia‘s apparent sexlessness—Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas’ relationship is relatively chaste—which is about the only thing the left could criticise in a movie that aimed to defend homosexuals while giving its leading protagonist a Spanish boyfriend and a black lawyer. (About the only other major criticism from the left I’ve heard was how the film stereotyped gay men as sex-obsessed, being that Hanks’ character catches AIDS while having sex in a porno theater while cheating on his boyfriend.)

None of these criticisms accurately reflect what’s good about Demme’s picture: the rightness of his political cause in giving sympathy to AIDS victims, demanding protection from job loss, and trying to remove society’s fear of homosexuals. Demme’s spiritual camerawork is also on full display, the way he has characters look directly into the camera lens (which never seems phony), or his exceedingly poetic use of closeup, as in the film’s best scene, where Hanks leaves Denzel Washington’s lawyer’s office to stand on the street, alone and tearful, as passersby cross the frame.

The film has been criticized for its formulaic structure, a drama that takes place largely in a courtroom, but that setting fits the general unease with the topics at hand, and gives a chance for the actors and the script to re-enact the culture’s misgivings on the subject matter, discussing and debating their feelings. None of this makes it a great work of art—it’s not—but they’re canny decisions to make an effective piece of propaganda, which is what the film is at its best.

Demme’s choice in casting Hanks could provide some room for quibbling—although, remember, at the time he was not the “serious” actor he’s known as today. Why cast Hanks and not someone who was actually gay? Why not cast someone who actually had AIDS? Valid questions, and not just because they demolish the silly idea that good acting is performing as far away from yourself as possible, which results in audiences thinking that casting someone who is what their character is means they’re not really acting.

The fact is that Demme actually did cast someone who was gay and had AIDS—Vawter. But he cast him as one of the lawyers at Hanks’ law firm, the one who seems to offer a degree of compassion for Hanks and embarrassment that his colleagues treated him the way they did. (Vawter’s character also sticks around for Hanks’ ultimate wake at the end of the film.) Rumour says that the studio didn’t want to cast Vawter due to his illness, in that they couldn’t get insurance for him, but when Demme pointed out the inherent hypocrisy of making a film about a man fired because he had AIDS, and then refusing to hire someone to work on that film because he had AIDS, the studio relented. But that may give reason for why Demme couldn’t cast someone like Vawter in the lead, even though he tried to include as many gay and HIV-positive people as he could in peripheral roles. (Incidentally, stories suggest that Demme never got around to filming Vawter’s lauded theater piece, Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, despite saying he would, forcing the dying Vawter to find another director before his death in 1994.)

Ultimately Philadelphia remains a highly watchable Hollywood production, a film that serves a political purpose and broke some sociological ground for gays and lesbians. What it’s not is a work of art; there have been a handful of films dealing with AIDS, and only a few of them give new, fresh insights into the disease and its meaning beyond the sort of sympathetic tearjerking that Philadelphia achieves. The film’s most poetic and realistic moments may be the opening images of everyday people going about their lives, Bruce Springsteen’s elegiac, mournful “Streets of Philadelphia” accompanying their movement, a soundtrack to a city and a country  full of ghosts, vanished and gone.

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