Philadelphia (1993) Review
7/10
A large Philadelphia firm makes one of its lawyers a senior associate, assigns him its most important case, and dismisses him nine days later for incompetence after a file goes missing. He has a lesion on his forehead. He sues.
The 7 is for a film that made a calculated decision about what it could achieve and achieved it. Jonathan Demme built a legal procedural because a legal procedural was a form the 1993 audience would sit through, and the calculation worked.
What the film costs itself in the process is intimacy, specificity and any real access to the relationship at its center, and those are real losses instead of complaints about ambition. I respect this film a great deal more than I love it. The courtroom half grips me, Hanks is very good, and the opera scene moves me deeply, but I spend the whole picture aware of a studio deciding how much of Andrew’s life an audience could stand to see. That caution is what holds it at 7.
The Calculation
Demme and Ron Nyswaner built the film as a wrongful dismissal case, with a jury, a hostile opposing counsel, a reluctant advocate and a verdict. That’s a form with enormous reach. An audience in 1993 that wouldn’t have bought a ticket to a film about a gay man dying of AIDS would buy one to a courtroom drama, and the film’s entire strategy is that the second delivers the first.
The mechanism is Denzel Washington’s character. Joe Miller is homophobic, states it, takes the case for money, and the film uses his gradual reconsideration as the route for an audience that shares his position.
That’s a deliberate and slightly cynical construction and it’s defensible on results. The film made around two hundred million dollars, was seen by an enormous number of people who wouldn’t otherwise have engaged, and changed what a studio would finance.
Demme had made Silence of the Lambs two years earlier and had been criticized for its portrayal of a gender-nonconforming killer, and has said this film was partly a response to that. Whether it’s an answer is arguable and the sequence of events is documented.
Choosing a familiar form to deliver an unfamiliar subject is a strategy with a known cost. The form’s conventions will occupy the running time, and what you wanted to say has to fit inside them. Decide whether reach or depth is the objective. This film chose reach and paid accordingly. A surrogate for the resistant audience is the standard device and it works. The cost is that your subject becomes the object of somebody else’s education. Be honest with yourself about which you’re doing. A film that chooses reach and then claims depth has failed at both.
Hanks
He lost a significant amount of weight across the shoot and the physical progression is the performance’s most discussed element and its least interesting.
What he does that matters is play a lawyer. Andrew is precise, is good at his job, argues well, and the film’s best material is him working. That establishes the loss the case is about without anybody describing it.
Neil Young’s Philadelphia closes the film and was also nominated alongside Springsteen’s. That means the picture had two original songs in the category and the soundtrack was doing part of the outreach work the courtroom structure was built for.
The dictation scene is the cleanest example. He’s working on a brief, is in pain, keeps working, and the film shows competence continuing under conditions instead of telling the audience about a decline.
The film also gets the firm’s culture right in two scenes. A partner comments on a racquetball game, somebody tells a joke in a corridor, and the picture establishes what Andrew has been concealing by showing what the room is like.
The opera sequence is the film’s high point and the one place it stops being a procedural. He describes a recording to Joe, at length, while it plays, and the scene is a man explaining something he loves to somebody who doesn’t understand it and is listening anyway. I’d sit through the film for those four minutes alone. It’s the one time Demme trusts Hanks to be a whole person on screen, and I wish he’d trusted him more often.
What the performance isn’t permitted to include is a physical life. Andrew has a partner, has had a history, and the film gives him one embrace at a party and nothing else. That’s the limit of the calculation. The party sequence is what survived of the cut material. The two of them dance, briefly, among their own friends, and it’s the one scene in the film where Andrew exists inside a community and not in front of an institution.
Antonio Banderas Has No Part
Miguel is Andrew’s partner of nine years and he’s perhaps a dozen lines and no scene of his own. The film’s reported history includes a more considerable relationship in earlier drafts and shot material that was removed, and the released version has the two men in frame together repeatedly and almost never in a scene about each other.
That absence is the film’s central fault and it’s the same structural failure Driving Miss Daisy and Forrest Gump have elsewhere on this page. Two subjects, one interior, one function.
The hospital scene is where the cost is clearest. Miguel is making decisions about Andrew’s care, is his partner of nine years, has no legal standing whatsoever, and the film establishes the injustice in a single line and doesn’t stay with him for it. The film loses me when the camera walks away from Banderas, who’s right there in the frame, to get back to the case.
Count your protagonist’s partner’s solo scenes. If the answer is none, the relationship is being asserted instead of shown, and the reader will feel the assertion. This is the third instance of the same fault on one page and it’s the most common structural failure in films about a marginalized subject.
A legal injustice stated in one line is information. A scene in which somebody sits in a corridor without standing is drama. Removed material leaves a hole that still functions. The film behaves as though the relationship exists because it was shot, and the audience receives the absence.
Demme has confirmed in interviews that material between the two men was shot and cut, including a scene in bed, and the stated reason was test screening response. That’s the whole calculation of the film compressed into a single production decision, made in a screening room by people who were watching a preview audience react badly to the scene that was then cut.
The Courtroom Works
The legal material is good and this is the half of the film nobody criticizes.
Mary Steenburgen’s opposing counsel is the reason. She’s professional, effective, visibly uncomfortable with what she’s arguing, and the film gives her a single line to camera about it and no more. Her cross-examination of Andrew is the film’s most effective legal writing. She’s polite, is technically correct throughout, and the damage she does is entirely within the rules. That’s the version of hostility that really occurs in a courtroom.
The specifics are also correct. The case turns on whether the partners knew, the evidence is a lesion and a witness, and the film understands that a wrongful dismissal case is about the employer’s state of mind instead of about the illness.
Jason Robards is the senior partner and the performance is the film’s coldest. He’s courteous, is entirely certain of himself, and delivers the firm’s position in a boardroom as a reasonable business judgment. That’s the correct way to write that character.
Robards also gets a single line in the deposition that states the firm’s real position: they didn’t fire him for being ill but for concealing it, and the film is honest enough to let that argument be coherent.
The library scene is the other one worth naming. A librarian suggests Andrew move to a private room, loudly, in front of everybody, and Joe sits down beside him instead, and the film delivers its whole argument in a piece of institutional politeness.
Joe doesn’t make a speech in that moment. He sits down, asks a question about the case, and lets an act of ordinary courtesy carry what a monologue would have flattened. I think it’s Washington’s best moment in the film, and I prefer it to every courtroom speech in the picture because nobody stops to explain what it means.
Day-Lewis
Best Actor went to Hanks. Daniel Day-Lewis was nominated for In the Name of the Father and this page argues he should have won.
The comparison is a real one. Day-Lewis plays Gerry Conlon across fifteen years, from a Belfast petty thief through a coerced confession to a prison relationship with his father and an exoneration, and the performance covers an entire transformation of character instead of a physical decline. I like Hanks here, but I’d have given the Oscar to Day-Lewis, and the vote was wrong.
Hanks also won for a film with a cause attached, in the year the Academy wanted to be seen recognizing the subject, and Hanks’s acceptance speech is among the most remembered in the ceremony’s history. That combination is difficult to separate from the vote.
He then won again the following year for Forrest Gump, which appears separately on this page, making him the first actor since Spencer Tracy to win consecutively. Both wins are questioned and the second more than the first. The Academy also nominated the film in only five categories and it won two, for Hanks and for Springsteen, with no nomination for Demme, for Washington or for the screenplay.
A performance attached to a cause the institution wants to endorse is competing on more than its own merits. That’s not the performer’s doing and it affects the result. Day-Lewis played a fifteen-year transformation and lost to a physical decline, and physical decline is the more legible achievement. Weight loss and prosthetics are assessable. A character becoming a different person over fifteen years isn’t, and the assessable version wins. That’s the same observation this page makes about Vice and Bohemian Rhapsody.
A film that arrives when an institution wants to make a statement will receive the statement. The work is the same and the reception isn’t.Bruce Springsteen also won Best Song for Streets of Philadelphia and it’s doing real work in the film. It opens the picture over footage of the city and establishes a tone the courtroom material then declines to sustain.
Should you watch Philadelphia?
Yes, and for what it did instead of what it is. A calculated courtroom drama that got a mainstream 1993 audience into a cinema for a subject they were avoiding, an opera sequence that’s the best four minutes in it, a superb cold performance from Jason Robards, and a nine-year relationship given a dozen lines.
It’s a 7 because the film did something brave for its year and then flinched at the exact moment it needed to be brave about Andrew and Miguel. I admire what it got a 1993 audience to sit through, and I’m annoyed that a test screening got to decide the most important relationship in the story would be a dozen lines long.
