Friday Movie Review – Philadelphia – A study of AIDS and Homophobia

What do you get when you mix a big time Hollywood Director, several superstar actors, a rock superstar and a plot that revolves around a scourge of a disease together? Sometimes you get a big mess. One time though, you got the award winning major motion picture, Philadelphia directed by Jonathan Demme and Jeffrey Schwartz, starring Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Antonio Banderas and Jason Robards, with a soundtrack title song by Bruce Springsteen.

In the mid to late 1980s and early 1990 AIDS rocked the gay community. Good men were testing positive for HIV, getting full blown AIDS and dying. A homophobic and panicked American population turned it’s collective back on the “gay disease” and distanced itself from any contact with gay men. The age of high powered LGBT activism began as HIV positive and concerned HIV negative gay males and  their lesbian sisters stepped in for their infected gay brothers and took up the fight for drug research, medical treatment and public awareness. The Hollywood community took up the cause as well.

In April of 1986 New York attorney Geoffrey Bowers was diagnosed with AIDS. In May of 1986 he received a satisfactory performance review from his supervisors in the law firm where he was employed. Two months later, the firms partners voted to dismiss him without following established protocol. Though his supervisors fought the dismissal, the board again voted in October and forced him to leave the company in December of that same year. He filed a discrimination complaint with the New York State Division of Human rights. His first hearing was in July of 1987. Bowers died of AIDS in September of 1987. His case drug on throughout 1993 before being resolved in his favor. The firm appealed, of course, but settled with his family in 1995.

The movie, Philadelphia, originally released in 1993, was inspired in part by Geoffrey Bowers story. Thy synopsis from Amazon.com:

Philadelphia wasn’t the first movie about AIDS (it followed such worthy independent films as Parting Glances  and Longtime Companion), but it was the first Hollywood studio picture to take AIDS as its primary subject. In that sense, Philadelphia is a historically important film. As such, it’s worth remembering that director Jonathan Demme (Melvin and Howard, Something Wild,
The Silence of the Lambs) wasn’t interested in preaching to the converted; he set out to make a film that would connect with a mainstream audience. And he succeeded. Philadelphia was not only a hit, it also won Oscars for Bruce Springsteen’s haunting “The Streets of Philadelphia,” and for Tom Hanks as the gay lawyer Andrew Beckett who is unjustly fired by his firm because he has AIDS. Denzel Washington is another lawyer (functioning as the mainstream-audience surrogate) who reluctantly takes Beckett’s case and learns to overcome his misconceptions about the disease, about those who contract it, and about gay people in general. The combined warmth and humanism of Hanks and Demme were absolutely essential to making this picture a success. The cast also features Jason Robards, Antonio Banderas (as Beckett’s lover), Joanne Woodward, and Robert Ridgely, and, of course, those Demme regulars Charles Napier, Tracey Walter, and Roger Corman. –Jim Emerson

The movie began life on 4 total screens. By the end of 1994, it would gross well over 206 million dollars as mainstream audiences flocked to theaters to see it. The AIDS based films Parting Glances and Longtime companion that preceded it may have originally been better studies of the disease, but this film did more to raise general public awareness, dispel homophobia and garner support than most other efforts combined.

It should be noted that the 2004 two disc set (linked via the graphic below), contains significant commentary by the director and Tom Hanks about the preparation for and filming of this movie. Also included are an 80+ minute documentary by AIDS patient Juan Botas. Botas was the inspiration for director Demme.