Put him together with one black shyster lawyer who hates gays (Denzel Washington). Take one noble gay white male hero (Tom Hanks). "Philadelphia" is put together like a paint-by-numbers kit.
To believe that seeing it would make any viewer - particularly those I would like to have experienced something meaningful watching this movie - change his or her point of view is like thinking Jesse Helms or George Bush or Ronald Reagan would turn into a human being after watching an episode of "Another World." It doesn't bear any truthful resemblance to the life, world and universe I live in, and every person I know lives in - or that the film's director, Jonathan Demme, and its screenwriter, Ron Nyswaner, live in either.
We're supposed to be grateful it's been made we're supposed to bamboozle everyone into seeing it because it's good for them.īut "Philadelphia" doesn't have anything to do with the AIDS I know, or the gay world I know. In other words, like Clinton's "Don't ask, don't tell" gays-in-the-military policy, we should go to this movie but not tell anyone how awful it is. And TriStar - along with, it seems, everyone else in Hollywood - has let us all know that if "Philadelphia" isn't a success at the box office, there just might not be any other films about AIDS. So for the 12 years of this plague, Hollywood has turned its back.īut finally a company called TriStar, which is a division of Columbia Pictures, which is a division of Sony Entertainment, which is a division of Japan, where there are very few AIDS cases, has given us "Philadelphia," which opens in Washington on Friday. There's no audience for this kind of subject, we've been told over and over. Why not AIDS? Oh, we knew why not: because AIDS is destroying certain communities others would just as soon see die. Other tragedies - the Holocaust, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam - have had their films. It saddens me to say that I'd rather people simply not see it at all.įor 12 years, millions of people - gays, people with AIDS, those with HIV infection, their families and friends - have been desperately waiting for a "major" movie to deal with this plague in a mature fashion. Philadelphia" is a heartbreakingly mediocre movie: dishonest, and often legally, medically and politically inaccurate.