Critics reviews

While many of the attitudes and misconceptions it dramatizes have thankfully changed over the intervening years, “Philadelphia,” as a film, is surprisingly resilient and effective if you revisit it today, further removed from the heat of an AIDS panic that made it seem both too unsubtle in its agenda and yet not hard-hitting enough in 1993.

The movie was made to persuade, maybe more so than to enthrall and persuade it does, mostly through gestures, reaction shots and music—i.e, through cinematic rather than literary values. When Beckett slow-dances with his IV stand, murmuring about the orchestration of the music playing on his stereo, the scene's true focus is Washington's lawyer, Joe Miller. He gazes at Andrew in astonishment, his face lit by firelight, his machismo melting away as his client describes, and then becomes, opera.

The concessions it makes... are glaring and cowardly. However, they are also what make the film a startling sign of the times in which it was made. That Philadelphia is a good movie—a sturdily and sensitively acted, directed, and conceived Hollywood drama—is almost beside the point these days; its importance lies less now in its quality than its historical status as a film that summed up the moment in a way it never intended.

Demme combines a script (written in collabo¬ration with Ron Nyswaner) that could have been produced as an after-school television spe¬cial with an expressionist mise en scène no less gripping in its effect than that of The Silence of the Lambs, and then throws in a few scenes shot documentary style for good measure. It is the hybridity that makes the film formally interest¬ing.