(3 of 3)
Today's corollaries are no more subtle. Police shouldn't torture men suspected of terrorism, because they might not have done it. Soldiers should not rape girls, because they might be as cute as Bambi. Corporate lawyers (Hollywood's new villain, here and in The Firm and The Pelican Brief) should not railroad a man with AIDS, because he might be Tom Hanks.
Hanks' Andy is a wonderful fellow: chipper, supremely competent, lavishing genial respect on colleagues high and low. He also seems a good subject for a sensibly daring film about AIDS. And for its first hour, Philadelphia is a pretty fine social comedy about private pain; it lays out the dilemma with a grace almost worthy of Hanks' bravely understated playing. But then it becomes % much too timid. It says that the death threat hanging over gays commands our sympathy for them. It renounces character shadings for easy good guys (Andy's huge family, each one of them amazingly accepting) and crumb-bums (his bosses, who can only mutter and sputter). Nothing in the real world is quite so simple as this.
And, to tell the truth, no ambitious movie is quite so simple as magazine trend pieces may try to make it seem. Certainly not Heaven & Earth, which is thematically grotesque but visually gorgeous: the camera takes in the spectacle of Southeast Asia (Thailand mostly, stunt-doubling for Vietnam) with the rapture of an intelligent lover. Because it traces Phung Le Ly's life story, the film is dramatically misshapen: its most singing moments are in the first half. And audiences may be as weary of Stone's haranguing about Vietnam as they are afraid of people with AIDS. But if Stone simplifies and distorts, he often does so brilliantly, like a cartoonist with a Fauvist's eye for the drama in color and character.
In the Name of the Father showcases a different kind of art. Sheridan (My Left Foot) is a bricklayer among directors; you can see the mortar between scenes. But he dares to make his hero something more, or rather less, than a plaster saint; Gerry is a scurvy thief who is guilty of every social crime but the one he's charged with. The drama here is eventually located not in the young man's battle against the Brits but in the coming to terms with his father, and thus his place in his family and his haggard country. It's a jailbird love story of two men bound by blood.
By the end, the conventions of all three films are exposed. They mean to shock and then inspire, with the revelation that good people can triumph. They amount to a tiny ray of Hollywood sunshine in the storm of 20th century chaos. While seeming to look clearly at the world, they ignore the bitter, deprived existences of most people who live in it: in Ukraine or Ireland or Vietnam, or in the death camp of an AIDS ward.