Law Review

Before Tom Hanks was making movies with performance demands so low that his hair style became the focus of many reviews, he was known for actually acting. I recently decided to take in a movie from that period that I hadn't seen before, Philadelphia. It was here that he won his first Oscar, portraying a lawyer trying to sue his former firm for firing him upon learning his was a gay man with AIDS.

He and Denzel Washington are indeed both outstanding in this movie. The strength of their performances alone would be enough to make this movie worth seeing, even if nothing else were going for it. But there's plenty of great dramatic material -- much of it focusing around the supportive family of Hanks' character -- that also make the movie well worth the time.

But it's far from perfect. There's a lot of material that comes off very cliché, and most of it has to do with Denzel Washington's character (as written). Does it really lift the proceedings to have him be prejudiced against gays so that he can "learn something" along with the audience? Are our hearts really supposed to soar when we hear a deliberating juror echo the catch phrase we've heard ad nauseum throughout the movie, "explain it to me like I'm a four-year old?"

Then there's the camera work. This movie has been brought to you by the Distractingly Tight Close-up Repertory Company. I really don't care what kind of artistic statement was trying to be be made through these choices, it's just intrusive to be almost constantly right up on top of the actors for the whole movie. What's more, it actually undermines some other stylistic choices made later on. In the final act, some even more unsettling camera work is brought in to represent the spread of AIDS -- strange focus, Dutch angles, direct address to the camera, and more. If this had come at the end of more "normal" cinematography, I think it could have made a very effective artistic statement. As it was, though, it just felt like a dial already at "8" being turned up to "10."

Still, the sentiment in the movie felt true far more often than it felt false. In almost every scene, the performances transcended the hurdles set in the way. And in the end, I'd rate Philadelphia a B.