Milk – Our Movie Review (Opens 11/26)
With "Milk," a great San Francisco story becomes a great American story.
Director Gus Van Sant uses the account of one of the country's first openly gay public officials, who was assassinated in 1978, to invest the gay rights movement with mythic grandeur, as a successor to all the heroic social protest movements in American history. Van Sant's point of view may be a matter of politics, outside the scope of a review, but his success in putting over his point of view is a question of art.
His success is complete. His shaping of the material is seamless, and the images he evokes are inspiring.
At the center of everything is Sean Penn, who disappears into the title role. Gone are his familiar facial expressions. Gone are the pursed lips and the covered, compressed quality. He has Harvey Milk's hair, and from some angles - particularly when Milk is in the public arena - the physical resemblance is uncanny. But what's more striking is the spiritual transformation. Penn gives us a man who was once closeted and now, as if in response, lives his life completely in the open. He's spontaneous as Penn has never been spontaneous. He's emotional, vulnerable and generous with his laughter. Penn plays him as an utterly liberated man, and this liberates Penn as an actor.
Milk's openness, which makes him an endearing figure, gives the movie latitude to paint a complex portrait without losing the audience's interest or affection. The Milk who emerges is at times vain and frivolous. His personal life is often messy and sometimes downright farcical, and his Machiavellian streak isn't becoming, even if impressive. He's no saint, but he has courage and self-knowledge, and you get the feeling that both qualities were hard earned. Van Sant's Milk is essentially an average man who gets the call. By chance, by accident of history, by some strange meeting of disposition and location, Harvey Milk, in the 1970s, finds himself to be the one person best suited to lead the gay rights movement.
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The movie begins with him in 1978, making a tape recording to be played in the event of his assassination. We then flash back to 1970, when Milk, at 40 years old, decides to throw off his closeted life and move from New York to San Francisco with his new lover, Scott Smith (James Franco).
Van Sant mixes archival footage with new footage - at times, it's impossible to tell one from the other - and it's fascinating to see San Francisco in the '70s. There's color and beauty, but also coarseness; excitement and hope, but with a feeling that something - or everything - just might spin out of control. The depiction looks accurate, but maybe it looks that way only to people, like me, who never saw San Francisco in that era. No matter. Van Sant captures something, either the city as it was or the San Francisco of legend.
By the time he arrives in San Francisco, Milk looks like a hippie, but he's an old hippie with non-hippie talents, such as a gift for organization and a head for business. He buys a camera shop, and soon his store becomes a community hangout. Before anyone else does, Milk realizes the potential clout of the gay community. He becomes the guy people go to when they get beaten up by the police. He becomes the guy the Teamsters talk to when they want the gay community on their side. A generation ago, it apparently wasn't that easy being gay in San Francisco, but Milk realizes the way out of the darkness: He understands that mainstream acceptance will come not through hiding and assimilation but through people being openly and unapologetically themselves.
"Milk" contains a second remarkable performance (unless you also count James Franco's, for looking totally OK about having Sean Penn kissing him like he means it). As Supervisor Dan White, who ultimately murdered Milk and Mayor George Moscone, Josh Brolin presents a chilling study in weakness. White's intelligence is limited. His self-conception is rigid and inaccurate. His anger is unspecific but towering, and he might be gay, though his homosexuality could be hidden even from himself. Brolin lets us see White's thought processes, which are slow and easily derailed by self-protective anger. Last month, Brolin played George W. Bush in "W." This week he's Dan White. He must wonder sometimes what casting directors are reading into him.
Van Sant's goal in "Milk" is to give the gay rights movement the grandness and impact of the civil rights movement. To do that, Milk must be made into the gay equivalent of Martin Luther King Jr., who led a moral crusade, fully knowing that he might be murdered along the way.
In truth, the King comparison only goes so far. Yes, Milk led a crusade that involved physical risk, and the real Harvey Milk did make tapes (in 1977) to be played in the event of his assassination. But it would be stretching things to say Milk was killed because he was gay. His death was more like a fluke, part of a macabre workplace crime that also robbed the city of its mayor. It's evidence of the film's effectiveness, its power to incite emotion, that Milk's death is made to feel like the inevitable consequence of his being a visionary.
One truth "Milk" doesn't need to amplify or manipulate: It's that Harvey Milk's story is part of the San Francisco story, and that story still means something, even to those who came to town years later and never heard of Milk until they got here. Van Sant's images of the candle-lit procession in the aftermath of Milk's death, of the tens of thousands filling Castro Street, are as moving as anything on this year's screen. Those images will mean the same everywhere - that there's something in the American soul that makes people want to come together and that makes progress unstoppable.
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Before Gus Van Sant’s film Milk was released, many people who didn’t watch Big Love wondered “who the hell is Dustin Lance Black?” That’s the young writer who made his name on Big Love, and whose name was credited large in trailers for his collaboration with Van Sant. After seeing Milk, the question was more like, “when will we see more from this guy?” Giving a great thank-you speech when accepting his Oscar for writing Milk helped cement interest in Black.
Well, Black is currently finishing up What’s Wrong with Virginia, the film he wrote and directed that stars Ed Harris and Jennifer Connelly. And now it seems like he’s been tapped to write a biopic based on the life of J. Edgar Hoover, the first director of the FBI and one of the most famous lawmen in the world. Pajiba reports that Black is writing the script for Ron Howard’s company Imagine Entertainment. While I’m not wild about the idea of Imagine being behind the film, that’s a really interesting hire. Black is very interested in representing the interests of gay culture, and has spoken passionately about young gay men and women being able to safely come out. Hoover was reportedly a cross-dresser and some claim he was homosexual.
Read more: Milk Writer Dustin Lance Black Penning J. Edgar Hoover Biopic?
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In honor of Memorial Day and with just days remaining before June (Official Gay Pride Month) I wanted to share with you the history of how the Gay Pride Rainbow Flag came to be. Not everyone in the Gay Community knows the story of our our Gay Pride Rainbow Flag so I wanted to share the story with you so you may share it with others.
As award’s season heats up, Sean Penn has emerged as an early front runner to win an Oscar after taking home top honors at Sunday’s Screen Actor’s Guild Awards. Penn took home the night's best actor prize for his critically praised performance as gay rights activist turned politician Harvey Milk. The film was largely overlooked by the Golden Globes – Penn scored the film’s only nomination, and was beat by The Wrestler’s comeback kid, Mickey Rourke. 
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences drinks your Milkshake all up as it announced eight nominations today for the Harvey Milk biopic, making it a heavyweight contender to actually win an award, which we'll find out next month. Who got nominated? 
James Franco and Diego Luna (All pics: Getty Images)
