Patron Pick – Philadelphia

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Bekah Lindstrom.

Philadelphia (1993)
Written by Ron Nyswaner
Directed by Jonathan Demme

I don’t really gravitate towards “issue” films. You know, the type of movie. It’s centered around a pressing social issue and dramatizes it in a way that appeals to mainstream audiences. These types of films often shave off the rough edges to not make the audience feel too uncomfortable. That defeats the purpose of bringing up the topic in the first place. Feeling discomfort when contemplating something like prejudice is the correct way to feel. We must examine our unconscious biases to become better people, open our arms wider, and accept people for who they are. I’m not saying it is always easy, but it is necessary to be the best version of yourself and help humanity as a whole. Philadelphia was a film I wrote off as that sort of “issue” movie. I’ve never entirely understood Tom Hanks’s appeal so that probably moved me away from it too. Boy, was I wrong about this movie, though still correct regarding a few things.

Andrew Beckett (Hanks) is a senior associate at a prestigious corporate Philadelphia law firm. He is also a gay man who keeps his status of AIDS from his co-workers. There’s a mix-up with a file that’s up against the statute of limitations that Andrew manages to salvage at the last minute. However, his bosses claim that there was a potential crisis in the first place shows what an unreliable lawyer he has become. Andrew is fired. Months go by, and Andrew is convinced that he was actually fired because he has AIDS and seeks out Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), a personal injury lawyer he’s argued against in the past, to help him sue for wrongful termination. Joe is a homophobe, though; in public, he tries to hide that part of himself. At home, he openly expresses his discomfort to his wife, and after being hit on by a young law student that had been keeping up with the trial in the news, he lashes out with a slew of gay epithets. However, Joe’s arc is to evolve and come to see Andrew, along with all the other gay people in his community, as human beings deserving of all the respect & dignity afforded to straight people.

What impressed me most with Philadelphia was the directorial choices from Jonathan Demme. Demme employs many of the same cinematographic techniques he used in Silence of the Lambs, particularly characters speaking directly to the camera. He also folds in suspense elements, especially in the first 30-40 minutes of the picture. No one explicitly says Andrew has AIDS until after he is fired. The camera tells us he has AIDS, but we must pay attention to understand that. Composer Howard Shore adds to that mystique with this music; some tracks sound like they could have been used in Silence of the Lambs. Yet, it never comes off heavy-handed or turns Andrew into a scary figure. Instead, the tension emanates from Andrew, the suspense is his fear of looks from people who notice the lesions on his face or who suddenly move away from him.

Demme and his actors make many inferences about how Andrew is judged. When he first comes to Joe’s office, they shake hands, but as Joe starts to put together why his colleague looks so ill, he moves away, he looks down at his hand. Andrew removes his baseball cap, and the camera (Joe’s POV) sees the lesion and follows the hand holding the hat to Joe’s desk. We cut to a framed photo of Joe’s family. Demme wordlessly communicates a valid fear of Joe’s: he doesn’t understand how AIDS is spread and is afraid he will catch it and/or give it to his family simply because he has had contact with Andrew. In 2023, we know this to be absurd, but when the film was made, there was still a lot of work to be done combating misinformation that had been allowed to spread by the Reagan administration’s abhorrent inaction on the virus. Demme doesn’t dismiss those fears but refuses to validate them and uses Joe’s story to show how people are perfectly safe in everyday casual interactions with those who have AIDS.

We should note that films, particularly Hollywood films, do not change people’s perspectives, at least for the better on a mass scale. Philadelphia did not have a measurable impact on the population’s change in how they felt about LGBTQ people or AIDS patients. Hollywood is a reactive institution; they make movies in response to what the population is already doing, to the changes in ideas that have already happened or are happening. This is where Philadelphia’s weaknesses begin to shine through. It insists on making this a singular story about a singular individual and never once acknowledges the revolutionary work done by queer & AIDS activists. They are not included in this story, and frankly, that is a tremendous degree of insult. Everyone should see How to Survive a Plague, a brilliant documentary about how hard people fought to simply get the American government to acknowledge there was even a problem. 

I’m not saying Philadelphia didn’t affect some people; I have no doubt it did. But being affected by something and being motivated to join a revolutionary movement to improve things are two wildly different things. Hollywood loves to encourage passivity; seeing the movie is an act of support, now, go back to work and keep consuming. How many lives could have been saved from AIDS if people reacted to these pieces of media with far more mobilized action? Not just queer sex but queer love is absent from this movie. Yes, Andrew hugs and is affectionate with his partner Miguel (Antonio Banderas), but I would argue it is not a realistic portrayal of two people genuinely in love. There’s a stiffness, a distance directly rooted in the embedded systemic homophobia of Hollywood. If my wife were in the hospital about to die, I would be giving her a far more passionate kiss of love than we see in this movie. We spend more time with Andrew’s family than getting to know him and Miguel as a couple.

The film also positions the masses as the antagonists, the homophobes against Andrew Beckett’s singular heroic gay man. That is the inverse of how the acceptance of gay people came about. It doesn’t happen on an individual level but as a mass movement. There are some brief glimpses of gay men who are not as well off as Andrew, but their stories are also pushed aside to tell the narrative of a wealthy white gay man. I’m not saying this is a terrible film, but I’m also not going to laud it with undeserved praise because its underlying message has a lot of problems. We never see Andrew or Miguel participating in the queer community outside parties or their home. If you didn’t know what it was to be gay and your first exposure was through Philadelphia, I suspect you would walk away still unsure.

The scene that clinched it for me was when Andrew left the courtroom and addressed the reporters outside. He states that his lawsuit and the circumstances of the case are “not political.” That is an absurdly stupid line. A gay man with AIDS in the 1990s suing his employer for wrongful discrimination is profoundly political. And being political isn’t bad despite how American society has tried to turn it into such a thing. If you live in a community, you are already engaged in politics. Politics are what builds & maintains the infrastructure, ensures people have shared rights and is also used to harm people. To exist is political, and politics are not a bad thing. They are methods of structuring civilizations. Philadelphia is a film made by a very deft hand, but the more I linger on its message, the less I like what it says about the gay experience in America.