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.

Bridge of Spies

Bridge of Spies has such exquisite craftsmanship that I can forgive most of its flaws. I found myself gawking at the beauty of this Cold War spy movie, one of the few in recent memory that doesn’t rely on exhausting action sequences. It’s interesting to note that Steven Spielberg, one of the filmmakers responsible for the mind-numbing blockbuster pictures that ubiquitously bombard us, is capable of making thoughtful, meticulously detailed, deliberately paced films. (And really, he’s much better than most of his peers at the mindless action stuff too.) Bridge of Spies lets us drink in every scene, and despite being overlong, it doesn’t have the veneer of self-importance of Lincoln, which was Spielberg’s tedious dissertation about the Civil War. It’s the most adult Spielberg film I’ve seen in recent years that does not equate “adult” with boredom.  

In Bridge of Spies, Tom Hanks plays insurance lawyer Jim Donovan, who in 1960 was tasked with defending an alleged Soviet spy named Rudolph Abel (played by Mark Rylance). Donovan feels ill-equipped for the job, but resolves to follow through to the end. This is a very good part for Tom Hanks, because there isn’t a lot of grand-standing involved. Hanks, whether we like it or not (and I don’t much like it), became the Everyman of American cinema in the 1990s. Now he’s turned into the Everygrandpa, and it’s often difficult to see the character through the star. But in Bridge of Spies, he’s believable, and he imbues the part with a welcome sense of humor. Hanks isn’t out to prove anything to anybody, which is perhaps the most gracious and generous thing he can do at this stage in his career.

The film explores the U.S. legal system and the fact that Donovan becomes a Pariah because he believes in the concept of due process, even when it’s a Russian spy being tried. Over the course of two hours and some change, Donovan and Abel develop an unexpected friendship. Abel is the consummate gentleman, a meek and even-tempered man in his 60s, who paints beautiful landscapes and portraits. Is this the face of the Red Menace? But Americans want to see him hanged, regardless of how nice he is. Spielberg grapples fairly competently with these complexities. So often, his films treat Grand American heroes and their respective mythologies with mindless, sugar-coated kid-friendly simplicity. With Bridge of Spies, Spielberg embraces moral complexity with confidence that sustains itself almost to the conclusion.

Of course, there’s always a moment in a Spielberg film where the director errs on the side of optimism, and in general, on the side of American exceptionalism. Much of the second half of the film involves an exchange of prisoners between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Donovan travels to East Berlin to negotiate the exchange, and there he is confronted with the horrors of the Berlin Wall. We see Communist worker-soldiers laying bricks and slathering mortar between them, erecting this very physical metaphor for the schism between Communism and Capitalism, between freedom and slavery. (These are the big, inflated, black-and-white themes that Spielberg both subverts and reaffirms in this picture.) Seeing the wall in that way, as an object under construction, not yet fixed but representing a chilling obstruction to freedom, was striking enough to give me pause. At the end of the film, as Donovan rides the train back to his home in Brooklyn, he sees some kids jumping over a fence. Not long before, Donovan had witnessed the execution of three people trying to jump the Berlin Wall. Now we see children, happily jumping over a fence that separates not two countries or two worldviews, but two houses. This moment of parallelism feels more than a little self-satisfied: We triumph with our Americanism, and here fences are just fences. It’s perhaps the one disingenuous note in the film, and yet it’s beautifully poetic, as propaganda. (I’m not suggesting that life in East Berlin was better with the Wall; merely that it’s an oversimplification to assume that fences in America aren’t doing the same kind of segregating work.)

The script is co-written by the Coen Brothers, who manage to reign themselves in without forgoing a sense of humor. Matt Charman shares script credit with them; perhaps he did the tempering work of linking Team Coen with Team Spielberg: It’s hard to imagine two more different sensibilities merging together for the same movie. But Bridge of Spies works; it's a good, not great film, and it's skillfully made. 

With Amy Ryan, Alan Alda, Austin Stowell (as the American pilot being held prisoner by the Russians), Scott Shepherd, Jesse Plemons, Domenick Lombardozzi, Sebastian Koch, Eve Hewson, Peter McRobbie, and Will Rogers.