Milk

Sean Penn as you’ve never seen him before! Certainly one of the actors of his generation, Penn gets in touch with his feminine side in Gus Van Sant’s powerful, moving biopic about the activist and San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk. Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, but was murdered soon afterwards. (No spoiler here – the movie gives us the outcome in the opening minutes.)

An audiotape Milk records “just in case” is screenwriter Dustin Lance Black’s convenient structuring device, allowing Harvey to narrate his own life story.

In this telling it’s a life that begins at 40 – when he picks up Scott (James Franco), falls in love, comes out and drops out. The year is 1970 and San Francisco beckons. Their Castro Street camera store soon becomes a focal point for the booming gay community, and it’s not long before Harvey makes the first of several unsuccessful runs for district supervisor.

Civic elections might seem like small beer, especially up against the competition from Frost/Nixon, W. and indeed Barack Obama, but the persecution that compelled Milk to stand is no trivial matter. The gay rights movement’s most critical accomplishment, the film suggests, is how it liberated gays to be themselves.

As Harvey tries to explain to his heterosexual colleague Dan White (Josh Brolin), this isn’t about principles, it’s about people’s lives – three of his lovers had threatened suicide. One of them, Jack Lira (Diego Luna), goes through with it. The political can’t get more personal than that. Ironically the devoutly “normal” White is the one who is truly messed up. (Brolin is terrific in this part, incidentally, much more sympathetic than White probably deserves.)

Here’s another irony: to earn the recognition and validation of the voters, Milk has to shed his reborn hippie uniform and ponytail, put on a suit and get a hair cut. Making the same calculation, director Gus Van Sant has axed the long takes and experimentalism that made Elephant and Paranoid Park arresting but decidedly marginal experiences and turned in his most conventional movie since Finding Forrester. In other words, he’s playing it straight this time.

The strategy is sound; the execution, assured. Van Sant captures the time and the place with unobtrusive precision, seamlessly mixing in reams of archival news reports but never tipping the 70s detail into kitsch. Sean Penn is studied and thoughtful, impassioned and immediately sympathetic as Harvey. We can see how he attracts so much support – and how his drive and commitment doesn’t leave enough time for a “real” life. When Penn smiles, there’s always pain there – it’s almost a wince – but we’re the ones who feel the sorrow: this Milk seems like a genuinely good guy, and we’d rather not lose him.

In truth, Milk the movie seems a little on the tame side. It’s a matter of taste, but I think it’s obvious that Van Sant expresses himself more freely and adventurously in his more experimental, independent films. That said, this is yet another exploration of untimely death, a subject that seems to have preoccupied Van Sant since the passing of River Phoenix. I would also venture to hazard that he found something to relate to in Harvey’s series of relationships with younger men.

Like Philadelphia and Brokeback Mountain, Milk advances its agenda with some caution – but no matter that all three films end in death and tears, that agenda is progressing, step by step. As I recall, Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas barely touched lips in Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning film. Ang Lee’s love story is more explicit than Milk, but it’s also haunted by repression in a way that Van Sant’s frank and intimate, forthright and engaged movie is not.

This is not just a single-issue movie either. In its conviction that change isn’t affected through rhetoric alone, but through the hard dedication of campaign work, persuasion, inspiration, inclusion, and good old, bad old politicking, Milk feels more than timely. It stakes a claim to be the first movie to reflect the Obama ascendancy, in all its audacity and hope.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com