i’m ready
by
Douglas Messerli
Ron
Nyswaner (screenwriter), Jonathan Demme (director) Philadelphia / 1993
For
some rather inexplicable reasons, I did not see the movie Philadelphia in
1993, when it originally appeared in Los Angeles. My husband Howard did, but
not I, and I only visited it on Netflix the other day, 27 long years after its
first appearance.
Although I have no justifiable excuse for
my long reluctance to see this film, I can partially explain it: Tom Hanks is a
reliable actor and I am sure is one of the nicest persons in the film community.
But his constant portrayals of somewhat blundering straight men have basically
left me cold. For him to play a big firm lawyer, suddenly discovered to have
acquired AIDS and his gay life behind it, required, I felt, more than a little
imagination. Why might they not have chosen an openly gay actor or even a
hidden gay actor in the Cary Grant mode?
Hanks reminds me a bit of the truly talented Meryl Streep, who can wonderfully mime almost any character she plays; but where is the real person behind the figures both she and Hanks portray? More and more, I perceive, I like actors who bring their own personalities into their roles: Bette Davis, Kathryn Hepburn, Cary Grant, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino—every one of them over-acting, but yet bringing their own identities into their performances. Hanks and Streep are just as talented, perhaps, but they lose themselves in their acting personalities as they adeptly transform their own beings into the characters they portray. In a sense they are deep deceivers, actors who become someone else in the process of their art. I never liked chameleons.
Hanks won an Academy Award for pretending
to be a gay man with AIDS. Hepburn won several awards for being Kathryn
Hepburn, a smart, fast-talking, independent-minded, possibly lesbian woman, who
flew planes, talked down her male companions, and chewed-up her stories with
her obviously New England upbringing. Grant played the lover to men and women
equally, recognizing his own personal sexuality and charm. Just by refusing a
breast over a leg in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, you knew he was
somehow an honest human being, a bit removed from Grace Kelly’s ferocious sexual
approaches.
Somehow Hanks seems clumsy in being the
lover of both Jason Robards—as the legal firm’s leader, whom we recognize is a
man desperately seeking a son, hugging the man he has chosen to his breast—and
the always beautiful and extremely intense lover of Miguel Alvarez (Antonio
Banderas). The character Hanks plays, Andrew Beckett, seems to be on both sides
of the various issues the movie explores: is he a calculating explorer
destroying young companies through his legal actions, while still tenderly
relating to his handsome lover?
In short, I don’t quite trust the
character, let alone believe in the absolutely loving Beckett family, father,
mother (and who could disbelieve Joanne Woodward?), sisters, brother who
support him despite the viral conditions of Andrew Beckett’s life. It may have
been true, inspired (some say based on the story of lawyer Geoffrey Bowers),
but it doesn’t ring out as a truthful statement of the era. In his roles Hanks
likes to portray morally responsible figures smudged-out and up by an evil
society at large. In reality, love was not so very easy, family and friends preferring
to turn away from those who had suddenly HIV death-sentences, and they were
terrified in those early days of acquiring the newly-discovered disease
themselves.
As the movie declares, many felt it was a disease actually chosen by those suffering from its consequences. By this time, it may have been, since we all suddenly began to discover how we might get infected; yet what can you do when you love and need to be loved by those of the same sex? The truth has still today to not be fully explored: how and why were so many young gay men destroyed by some disease that apparently might have come out of Africa? And yet today thousands are still suffering, many of whom, despite new drug regimens, will surely die.
Yet, in retrospect, how could you not
enjoy this Jonathan Demme film, filled, as it is, to the gills with some of the
best performers of the period, Hanks, Mary Steenburgen, Banderas, Woodward,
Karen Finley, Bradley Whitford, and Anna Deavere Smith?
And then Joe Miller (Denzel Washington)
enters, a successful black man who carries his homophobic upbringing as a chip
on his shoulder, yet who gradually grows to perceive how mistaken he has been
and even develops his own kind of love for the dying Beckett. One might almost
imagine that Miller represents the kind of Godot Beckett was eternally waiting
for.
This “grinder of the grain,” the original
meaning of Miller's last name, boils down the legal issues that Beckett has
established quickly, deciding despite his own fears of AIDS, to represent
(after nine other lawyer’s refusal) Beckett’s petition of the unfairness of his
being fired from his job for having AIDS.
Washington is a brilliant actor always
and plays this role almost as a reverse of the understandably pontificating
Beckett as he gradually perceives that the prejudice that Beckett has been
subject to is not so very different from what he has experienced all his life.
Fortunately, screenwriter Ron Nyswaner does
not make too much of this, allowing us to fill in the blanks of the slowly
comprehending legal defendant.
Miller wins his case with a 5-million-dollar
compensation for the dying Beckett, but in this film it hardly matters. The plaintive
dies soon after, celebrated in his family’s home by a memorial that almost
wipes out his real significance, portraying only his happy early days as a
child on home movies.
I guess, even in 1993, I sensed that this
totally Hollywood film was not the way to truly comprehend what had happened to
so many gay men, lesbians, bisexual, transgender, and other sexual people—not
to forget the millions of straight women and men who have died from the terrifying
disease.
In the end, Philadelphia—a city in
I lived many days each week in that very same period—is a strange version of a “feel-good”
movie. But who can truly feel good when a man dies just for going to bed with a
lover? Or when a woman dies for simply having sex with her husband?
Yet I must confess, I cried throughout the
entire film—which, of course, is the reaction that allowed it so many awards in
its time. Perhaps seeing it so late in my life, so long after the worst of the
AIDS infections, is simply better. It’s a good movie about important issues.
But the devastation of the disease was not won by large legal compensations,
but simply by death. As Beckett can only admit near the end of this film, “I’m
ready.” You truly can’t take it with you.
Los
Angeles, January 22, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (January 2020).
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