Remembering Jonathan Demme: Philadelphia

Jonathan Demme’s passing has already been noted – by writers far more qualified than me. But I want to offer a few words on his films, particularly Philadelphia, which I just recently watched. Encountering Demme’s work in the way I have, in a random and unpredictable fashion (more on that later) reminds me how much of my film knowledge has been accumulated in haphazard, almost nonsensical ways, devoid of historical context. I saw Demme’s slick, terrifying thriller Silence of the Lambs (1991) years before I saw his wacky, clever comedies Married to the Mob (1988) and Something Wild (1986). I haven’t seen Melvin and Howard (1980), the film which put Jonathan Demme on the map, or Stop Making Sense (1984), the Talking Heads concert movie that remains one of the most critically acclaimed concert movies ever. And this week, for the first time, I sat down and watched Philadelphia (1993). I knew enough about Philadelphia to feel as though I’d seen it. My parents used to watch it frequently, or at least my vague memories suggest that Philadelphia was on the rotation cycle. They like Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington. My family is conservative and Evangelical Christian. We were raised to believe that homosexuality is a sin. We were probably taught that AIDS was something bad people got (although I don’t remember my own parents saying this, thankfully) because they had it coming.

I sat down to watch Philadelphia partly because it was mentioned on the Slate Culture Gabfest’s recent episode about Demme. But more importantly, I needed to watch something depressing. I was in the throes of an unbearable depression, and I thought maybe if I watched enough sad movies, I could just let the pain bleed out. Is anything sadder than watching Tom Hanks, the Everyman of the 90s, die of AIDS? Is there anything more gratifying than watching Denzel Washington, the other Everyman of the 90s, defend him in court?

I wept. But I don’t think Philadelphia is a great movie. I used Philadelphia because I knew it would milk the tears out of me, and the movie did its job. But I don’t feel the same affection for it that I feel for other sad movies that I love, like Manchester by the Sea and You Can Count on Me, or Moonlight, or Ordinary People. Philadelphia exists on some other plain for me. It’s a very well-made and socially conscious movie with two great actors, and as much as this movie makes me feel its pain, it’s hard not to feel its intentions, which are admittedly very good intentions, announcing their presence.

Philadelphia exists to show homophobic people that gay people are human beings. It’s not the most complex depiction of gay people, and it’s certainly dated nearly 25 years later, but there’s an undeniable power in its grim slick Hollywood texture, in the choice of Tom Hanks, a comedy star, to play this lawyer who’s fired by his firm for being gay (and afflicted with AIDS). The homophobic man (or woman) is asked to identify with the Denzel Washington character. Washington plays Hanks’s lawyer, a local TV celebrity who despises gay people even as he defends one. Washington’s performance reminded me of his character in Fences, a character I really found insufferable. But, unlike so many lofty yet hollow message movies, Philadelphia has a real, beating heart, and that is the heart that Jonathan Demme infused into all of his movies. Even in something as unsuccessful as Ricki and the Flash, Demme’s final film, he could make us care about the characters. We move beyond congratulating him for having lofty social intentions, and just feeling like we’ve spent two hours getting to know a few people exceptionally well. So even when Demme doesn’t succeed, or partly succeeds, his work is always worth watching. As so many people have already mentioned, Demme cared deeply about human beings, and this is the thread that runs through his diverse body of work.

In fact, the most moving part of Philadelphia may be the opening credits, where we see a montage of different locations in the city, all of them populated by people: walking to work, cooking dinner, playing in the streets, cajoling and carrying on, hobbling with grim seriousness: the sequence is a moving portrait of all the varied pulsating little threads of human life that make up a city, punctuated by Bruce Springsteen’s moving, hymn-like pop ballad, “Streets of Philadelphia.” Where much of Philadelphia feels weighed down with grim importance, this opening sequence feels vulnerably light and almost sacred. What a gifted filmmaker we have lost, who could put so much thought and feeling into so many different kinds of movies.

As Peter, Tom Hanks gives a moving performance. (And of his two Oscar-winning performances, I'll take this one over Forrest Gump any day.) I think I admire him more for making the choice to play an openly gay man (whether it was a calculated choice or not), than I like the performance, as good as it is. (And trust me, I wept like a baby at the end of the movie.) But there are other performances that I savored more, like Mary Steenburgen as the opposing attorney, who tries to discredit him for being "reckless," or Jason Robards, playing his boss at the law firm, the typical old Philadelphia fogey who bristles at the thought of allowing a gay man into his fold, or darling Joanne Woodward, who doesn't have enough screen time, as Peter's mother.

But we must bear in mind that just because a movie has a walloping emotional effect on us, that doesn't make it a great movie. Philadelphia is a pretty good movie, with some great parts. In less capable hands, Philadelphia would have been a real mess, too content in its own liberal-mindedness to actually reach people. As it is, I think Philadelphia is the kind of movie that actually might change some people's minds, and more importantly, their hearts. Even if it's not a great movie, that's good enough for me.

Addams Family Values: An Appreciation

The 90s seemed to be obsessed with turning bad and sometimes beloved American sitcoms into bad movies. But there was one adaptation that stood out from the rest: Addams Family Values, the 1993 sequel to The Addams Family (which is pretty good too). The casual, cheeky gothic tenor of the show isn’t lost on director Barry Sonnenfeld, who brings out the best in his cast. Addams Family Values is, I think, cherished in the memories of kids who grew up in the 90s, and for good reason. 

Where do I start? With Joan Cusack. Cusack was no stranger to comedy. She’d turned in small performances in John Hughes movies like Sixteen Candles, supporting roles as the bestie to Melanie Griffith and Michelle Pfeiffer respectively, in Working Girl and Married to the Mob (both 1988), and played the killjoy love interest in the Steve Martin-Rick Moranis mob comedy My Blue Heaven (1990). Addams Family Values gave Cusack a chance to carry a larger role and play a femme fatale: the deliciously psychotic man-leech Debbie Jellinsky, who marries Uncle Fester (Christopher Lloyd) for his money. She ingratiates herself into the Addams household by posing as a nanny (she’s actually a serial spouse-slayer), and when the older kids figure out her scheme, she sends them off to a chipper summer camp to keep them from blabbing. Cusack has a big personality, and she's a woman who seems totally embodied: you don't fail to notice a Joan Cusack appearance. Those soft eyes can bat at you and steal your heart, and then a moment later elicit a glare of comic rage that's both funny and terrifying. And that blonde hair, so strikingly different from Cusack's usual red-brown, provides the maniacal finishing touch. Cusack practically steals the show. 

And then there’s Christine Baranski, Broadway star (and sitcom BFF to Cybill Shepard on her now forgotten series Cybill), playing one of the blissfully dopey camp counselors trying to inflict her cheerfulness upon poor Wednesday Addams (Christina Ricci) and her brother, Pugsley (Jimmy Workman). When the elder Addams kids are shipped off to Camp Chippewa, they’re immediately subjected to the counselors’ joyish terrorism. Peter McNicol plays Gary Granger, and Baranski plays his wife, Becky Martin-Granger: they favor the bratty mean girl who thinks she’s talented because she’s pretty, and ridicule all the misfit kids (including a hypochondriac Jewish kid named Joel, who becomes Wednesday’s first boyfriend). No comedy ever captured the tyranny of relentlessly cheerful extroverts more aptly. When Wednesday refuses to smile, she’s forced to spend 24 hours in the “Harmony Hut,” which plays The Sound of Music, Annie, and episodes of The Brady Bunch on a loop.

Which brings me to Christina Ricci, who had a prolonged moment in the 90s playing the damaged, dark, cerebral teenage girl in movies like Ghost World. (She was more cynical than Reese Witherspoon and wittier than Thora Birch.) Ricci may have become pigeon-holed as a black-lipsticked goth girl, but she left her mark, and she registers as one of the most important and endearing 90s movie kids. (There were so many annoying ones, taking their cue from those little monsters in The Goonies.) When Wednesday stages the attack on Camp Chippewa—by sabotaging the big Thanksgiving-themed play—it’s the triumph of anarchy over conformism. No hipster could have done it better than Ricci, dressed as Pocahontas, treating the pilgrim-kids to a little reverse imperialism. The scene, which is my favorite in the whole movie, echoes the unashamed violence of a Bugs Bunny short, and channels John Waters' giddy anarchism too. 

That’s what is so wonderful about Addams Family Values (and about the Addams Family brand in general): its pointed, joyful rejection of the worst elements of mass culture and its love of anarchy. We’re told that movies like The Sound of Music are great entertainment because they’re wholesome, and good for us. But it’s wholesomeness for the sake of money, money milked from the wallets of audiences, and what good is wholesome culture when it denies reality? Let’s remember that The Sound of Music and The Brady Bunch were products of the 1960s, the same decade that brought us such atrocities as Vietnam, the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., and such urgent, often tragic cultural moments as the civil rights movement. Addams Family Values dares to smile and laugh in the dark, and happily subverts all the fears that so often consume us, that drive us to the lies of The Sound of Music. 

I’ll close with an appreciation for Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia. Huston gives the most understated performance in the film, which makes her wonderful acting easy to overlook. She imbues Morticia Addams with an exuberant sadness that glimmers through her pale white skin and throws her black hair and wardrobe into relief. And Julia, wide-eyed and ever the gentleman, has such life in him that you could never believe his own life was coming to an untimely end. 

When Morticia conceives a baby, she and Gomez are delighted, until it morphs into a blond, curly-haired, smiling toddler. Morticia is horrified, as though she’d delivered a werewolf. (Actually, a werewolf would be a welcome improvement.) Gomez weeps in despair even as he tries to comfort his wife. But nothing can comfort you when your perfectly strange baby suddenly turns...normal. Addams Family Values takes delight in a world that is off-kilter and strange, but it's our "normal" world that becomes increasingly suspect in the process. 

Dazed and Confused

I’ve never been able to stomach American Graffiti. I wasn’t into the music of the late 50s/early 60s, and something about the period—at least as it exists in American pop mythology—feels utterly false. For me, Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused fills any void that not liking American Graffiti might have left in my heart. I seem always to be discovering directors’ works in a kind of retroactive progression. I saw School of Rock as a kid (which is a terrific movie), and only today did I finally sit down and watch Dazed and Confused, came out ten years earlier than School. In Dazed and Confused, Linklater creates a rich world inhabited almost exclusively with teenagers, all of them celebrating the last day of school. 

It’s 1976 (although the movie was shot in the early 90s, which makes it a mirror of American Graffiti in some ways) and, like American Graffiti, it deals with the anxieties young people feel about their lives. But instead of the looming but distant threat of Vietnam, the kids in Dazed and Confused find themselves looking back at both the war and Watergate and wondering if there’s any point in listening to authority. That’s one of the main character’s beefs with his football coach, who’s asked all the returning teammates to sign a pledge that they won’t drink or do drugs or have sex over the summer; the coaches don’t want to jeopardize the team’s chances of a winning season. It’s hard not to be cynical when those in charge want to keep you from having a good time purely for their own benefit.

There’s often something special about movies that take place all in one 24-hour-period. Somehow, they feel endless, yet there’s a feeling of melancholy when they do end, all too soon. Sixteen Candles has it; much of Valley Girl is set during one day and night; even Halloween captures this mood, although in horror movies this is more common than not. Indeed, Dazed and Confused taps into that ephemeral mood and, because the characters in the movie feel so well-drawn, it holds out attention. We may not remember the 70s—many of us weren’t born—but we can identify with their experience just the same.

What’s maybe most striking to me is the cruelty present within the movie. Perhaps because the film is set in a smallish town (in Texas), there’s a more present feeling of ownership that motivates rising seniors to throw their weight around and motivates freshman to sit there and take it. I never experienced anything like that, but I suppose I was lucky. Both the boys and girls are subjected to various degrees of pain and humiliation that feels genuinely sadistic, especially in a light-hearted comic film like this. But there may be a darker undercurrent at work here. And when the wretched O’Bannion, played by Ben Affleck, gets his just desserts after mercilessly paddling two of the boys, it’s sweet justice.

With Jason London, Wiley Wiggins, Matthew McConaughey, Sasha Jenson, Adam Goldberg, Anthony Rapp, Marissa Ribisi, Michelle Burke, Parker Posey, Joey Lauren Adams, Milla Jovovich, Jason O. Smith, Shawn Andrews, Christine Harnos, Cole Hauser, Zellweger, and Rory Cochrane. 

Manhattan Murder Mystery

Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). Diane Keaton and Woody Allen traipsing through Manhattan trying to figure out if their elderly neighbor (Jerry Adler) murdered his wife. An enjoyable movie (Allen's 2006 comic-mystery Scoop is kind of a companion to it) that coasts on the charisma of its stars. Keaton's character drives the investigation--she's bored with her life and the prospect of a genuine murder mystery is just too tantalizing to ignore, dragging her neurotic, whiny, reticent husband (Allen) along. The banter between them is wonderfully witty, a lovely little tribute to the films they made in the 1970s like Annie Hall. I think this one is totally underrated. It's not as "important" as some of Allen's earlier films, but it's got a wonderfully vervy charm to it that keeps the viewer engaged in the comic suspense. With Alan Alda, Anjelica Huston, Joy Behar.