PHILADELPHIA (Directed by Jonathan Demme. Starring Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Jason Robards, Antonio Banderas)

IT HAS taken over ten years, but now that it is here – a big budget, all-star American mainstream AIDS movie – you wonder what all the fuss was about. Hollywood has always loved deadly diseases and human rights issues and Jonathan Demme’s movie perfectly balances those elements in a powerful, tearjerking drama. Of course, Hollywood’s real problem with AIDS was that is an ugly disease and the humans involved were mostly homosexual. Demme’s considerable achievement has been to bring humour and imagination to a project that tackles prejudice head on, and in doing so he has made issues movie works as a purely confrontational drama.

There have been mainstream movies that touched on AIDS, allegorically or metaphorically or by some other subverting device, like Dracula, The Fly or Lorenzo’s Oil, but Philadelphia calls a halt to all that beating around the bush. “Are you a faggot, a queer, a pillow hugger . . .?” demands Denzel Washington in court, reeling off a comprehensive list of insulting gay nick-names, insisting he just wants to get it out in the open, what everyone knows the case (and the film) is really about: homosexuality.

And it does get it out, just not too far. Hanks is quietly engaging as Andrew Beckett, a homosexual lawyer who believes he has been sacked because he has AIDS. Out of the closet required by his job he quickly drops his be-suited mimicry of straight (laced) life, shaving his head and starting to wear loud hats and jumpers, but he still doesn’t get to kiss the love interest. A peck on the cheek (shot from behind) is as close as he and Antonio Banderas get, which is probably taking safe sex a little too far.

But if Demme skimps on the sex (possibly in a misguided effort to placate the same mythical mid-Americans who flocked to see a straight man seduced by a transsexual in The Crying Game) he does not pass up on the sexual politics. Washington plays Joe Miller, an openly homophobic lawyer who must argue against homophobia and, in the course of time, come to some compromise between his own fine words and baser instincts.

With his trademark softspoken sincerity, Washington is an ideal audience surrogate, making gay jokes but growing increasingly uneasy as he is forced to come to terms with his client as a person. The audience may not have quite the same problem: Hanks has such an amiable screen persona that he will probably have automatic sympathy, yet there could be uncomfortable moments for the less liberal viewer as Demme fires accusations of bigotry right into the stalls. Both the prosecution and the defence initially state their cases directly to camera. We, the jury, must decide. But while Washington speaks words of tolerance, for the prosecution the equally sincere Mary Steenburgen talks of lifestyles and reckless behaviour, dragging the case as close to the gutter as it can get.

For much of the movie it is a relatively undemanding role for Hanks, who visibly withers away onscreen but whose emotional range seems limited to amiability and doggedness. It is only on the stand, having his past and his very identity attacked, that he genuinely begins to seem lost and bruised, like a rape victim being raped again.

But in the end, Philadelphia is not really a courtroom drama. Demme plays it like a thriller, teasing out the possibilities, but he keeps avoiding the obvious big scene and replacing it with something a little left-field, leaving us with such a moving picture of human pride and prejudice that we hardly care about the verdict. Demme has always been an inventive film-maker, and Philadelphia, with all its constraints, really stretches him to his limits. He changes tack and style, somehow combining realism with moments of pure expressionism. Hanks’ big scene takes place not on the stand but in his own head, as he drags his IV unit around his flat, lot in an operatic Maria Callas’ death scene, while the light turns red and the once static camera swoops all about him.

It is just one moment in which Demme employs music to startlingly underpin the visual. On a great soundtrack (that includes a Neil Young original and a Spin Doctors version of ‘Have You Ever Seen The Rain?) Bruce Springsteen contributes the title track, an achingly beautiful song as good as anything the Boss has ever written, and Demme wisely gives it a full hearing, not fading it out for immediate entry to the drama but using it to illustrate a lovely sketched introduction to the whole city.

For Philadelphia is a character here, the city of brotherly love, where the founding fathers drafted their declaration of independence, and the movie is a demand for those values to be respected. It may not have the ciné verité power of an art-house AIDS movie like Savage Nights but its mainstream intelligence is its real strength. Philadelphia does not preach to the converted. By combining thriller and weepie in one compelling drama, Demme has made an AIDS movie for people who’d rather not think about AIDS, the kind of film you could take a bigot to.