Philadelphia.

Philadelphia deals with two subjects, one explicitly, the other implicitly, and neither one of them is AIDS. Each theme has its own climax, one harrowingly achieved, the other sadly fumbled. Both themes involve a change of perception experienced by the character Denzel Washington plays. So the actor got it right in the statement that was quoted in the New York Times (January 16, 1994), "This is not a movie about AIDS, really. It's an emotional self-examination." And he certainly gets everything fight on screen with a performance of admirable economy and terse humor that nicely interacts with Tom Hanks's piquant blend of feyness and lucidity.

The overt theme is homophobia. Homophobia it is that prompts a prestigious law firm's senior partner (Jason Robards) to engineer the firing of his protege (Hanks) when he learns that the brilliant young attorney has AIDS. Hanks counters with a wrongful termination suit and, his case rejected by nine other lawyers, winds up with an intelligent ambulance chaser played by Washington. (The ACLU wouldn't take this case on? Don't ask. The script won't tell.) In court, Washington exposes the bigotry that motivated the firing, but out of court he has to come to terms with his own homophobia.

The change in Washington is plausibly dramatized but we are never in any doubt that it will happen, for the character he plays is a decent chap quite ready to drop his prejudices once he works with a homosexual side by side. Much more interesting, potentially fascinating in fact, are the murky emotions underlying Robards's revulsion. Scriptwriter Ron Nyswaner is really onto something here as he shows that this elderly macho man once took such fatherly pride in the young lawyer's acumen that during the showdown in court he can still feel a glow of pleasure at hearing Hanks, on the witness stand, describe Robards as a demigod of the profession. Although Robards may ostensibly fear AIDS being brought into his office, what really burns him is that he thought he knew Hanks well, but the visible ravages of the disease prove that he didn't. It is this unintended psychological rebuff that has aroused the old man's ire and his act of injustice. Nyswaner has written a climactic courtroom duel for Robards and Washington that is meant to lay bare the former's resentment. But director Jonathan Demme bungles the scene by putting his camera, so to speak, inside Hanks's head and having the cross-examination heard through the distorting echo chamber of the AIDS victim's failing hearing and seen through the blur of his failing vision. What we get is a swirling, subjectively photographed death agony instead of what the theme of homophobia really calls for: a lucid revelation of the roots of fear and hatred.

But then there is that other, implicit theme of Philadelphia: the preciousness of life made more precious under the shadow of the wingspan of death. Here Demme's direction triumphs in the scene in which Washington tries to spend one evening in Hanks's apartment coaching his client for his upcoming testimony in court. In the background, a stereo is playing an aria from Andrea Chenier sung by Maria Callas. Washington's diligent questions are all about the past and the future, but Hanks can by now respond only to the fleeting beauty of the now as he hears it in the passion of the diva's voice. He rises, an IV needle still in his arm, and dances, floats really, in the embrace of the music. The camera hovers with him, but this movement is intercut with anchored shots of Washington transfixed by compassion and hushed horror. In his client and friend, Washington now sees not just the devastation of AIDS, not only the pathos of one man dying too soon, but the innate tragedy of all mortality: the ascending spirit flailing in its crumbling shell. Once Hanks subsides, Washington can only excuse himself, hurry home, and embrace his wife and child. It's a magnificent scene in an often gripping but unfulfilled movie.

An odd, unsettling thing happens in the first trial scene of In the Name of the Father. Sitting in the dock and hearing themselves anathematized by the prosecutor for the I.R.A. bombing of a pub in Guilford, England, several of the defendants start to giggle. This is perfectly understandable, for the gigglers are children. One is a fifteen-year-old boy, another a girl of seventeen. The only habitual criminal on trial--the protagonist, twentyish Gerry Conlon--has been a petty thief and a one-time burglar. None of them has ever been remotely involved with terrorism, but they're hearing themselves described as monsters of ultimate evil. They know perfectly well they're in a jam, yet the accusations are so outlandish that they have to choke back their laughter.

Also on trial are senior members of the Conlon clan-- Gerry's father and aunt--and the adults aren't laughing one bit. They know exactly what's up. It's the early seventies: the I.R.A. has been devastating London with bombs, and the public is crying out for vengeance. Because of this pressure, the government investigators have rigged a case by planting false evidence and suppressing facts. The frame-up works, the verdict is guilty, and the sentence is so severe that Gerry will be approaching early middle age before he and his relatives are vindicated. The Conlons have done nothing worse than be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but they're in for it.

This is a movie about monstrous injustice but its creators, writer-producer Terry George and writer-director Jim Sheridan, aren't content with showing the horror done to the defendants. They also dramatize how injustice affects everybody who comes into contact with it. When the verdict is read, the girl defendant is carried off in hysterics but one of the policewomen attending her also collapses. A warden tries to be decent to the imprisoned father but a real terrorist (who's in the same prison with the innocent man) torches the officer because he can regard him only as a tool of oppression. Sheridan even insists that we see how the perpetrators of injustice suffer. As the chief investigator perjures himself on the stand, the director gives us a close-up of his lying mouth but then pulls the camera up to his suffering eyes. This man's own corruption is eating away at him. No facile equivalence is committed here, but Sheridan's blazingly humane point is that injustice is a plague and contamination that respects neither innocence nor guilt.

Sheridan has played so fast and loose with the facts of the Guilford case that the movie is being decried in England as the Celtic J.F.K. Two points should be made about this comparison:

First: whatever its merits as sheer filmmaking (dim, in my minority view), J.F.K. employs its fictionalizing to make a case (Kennedy murdered by the Pentagon) that is coming to seem more tenuous, not to say preposterous, as time and assassination probes march on. But the central fact of the Guilford case--that the Conlons were framed--is not now in any serious doubt, no matter what fictionalizing Sheridan employs to present it.

Second: one of the main fictionalized devices--showing Gerry and his father imprisoned in the same cell--doesn't develop the legal aspect of the case at all but helps focus attention on the emotional problems of Gerry Conlon.

But In the Name of the Father isn't agitprop. For all its gritty realism and headlong tempo, it's a poetic exploration of the nature of authority. The title itself is double-edged. It doesn't refer only to Gerry's relationship with his father but to what is done in the name of the state. More than ever, the state presents itself as an ambiguous parent to each of us--succoring, regulating, punishing. (President Bill Clinton's State of the Union address promises no diminishment of this.) In the name of the paternal state the chief investigator suppresses the truth and ruin's the lives of the innocent. On the personal level, the goodness of the elder Conlon, as filtered through his meek, pious temperament, infuriates his son and spurs him on to greater delinquencies. Yet his underlying love for his father will finally give Gerry the tenacity to prove the family blameless. In the Name of the Father is a hate/love poem to parental authority.

Jim Sheridan proved he was a great director of intimate drama in My Left Foot. Here, he's wonderful again with his actors but also proves himself a remarkable action director.

There is no crack in Pete Postlethwaite's characterization of the senior Conlon that shows you the actor within plugging away. I got the feeling that if I called Postlethwaite up at four in the morning, he would answer me in Conlon's gentle voice and communicate all of the man's saintliness right over the phone.

I'm sick and tired of using this column as a camouflaged love letter to Emma Thompson (who plays Gerry's lawyer), so let me note only that in her outburst in court during the climactic trial, Thompson's high dudgeon is done in her highest style, and that's as high as style or dudgeon gets.

As for Daniel Day-Lewis, he's beginning to scare me. I've long known that he combines the versatility of a Guinness and-- when needed--the sex appeal of Mick Jagger; that his talent leaps over boundaries of class and age. Who else could believably play both the sixty-year-old Newland Archer fastidiously walking away from love at the end of The Age of Innocence and the twenty-year-old Gerry Conlon, for whom Belfast rioting is rock 'n' roll? All that's merely a matter of acting genius. But now, gazing at a still from In the Name of the Father, I confirm what I was struck by while watching the movie: Day-Lewis has changed the shape of his chin for this role. Make-up? Plastic surgery? Black Magic? I'm quite ready to concede that Day-Lewis is the greatest film actor under forty, but I'm also beginning to suspect that he has sold his soul to the devil. If that is the case, I will no longer be able to praise his performances in a Catholic magazine.