Although the events depicted occurred thirty years ago, Gus Van Sant’s Milk feels culturally fresh and politically relevant—a new film for a new American order about a community organizer preaching for hope and change. Milk is a bio-pic but it avoids many if not all of the genre’s pitfalls by focusing on an eight-year period in Harvey Milk’s life, specifically narrowing in on the anxieties and community tensions surrounding the controversial 1978 vote for the Briggs Initiative, otherwise known as Proposition 6, a law that, if passed, would ban gays and lesbians and anyone who openly supported GLBT rights from teaching in the California public schools. This, if you are old enough to remember, was one of orange juice fascist Anita Bryant’s (the Ur-Sarah Palin but also one of the first celebrity voices of the nascent American culture wars) efforts to rid America of degenerates in order to “Save Our Children†from the “homosexual agenda.†Now there’s a bio-pic worth making, but I’ll leave that to John Waters.
Van Sant, along with cinematographer Harris Savides, utilize archival footage and the employment of various film stock to create an almost docudrama texture, conjuring up a cinematic immediacy firmly rooted in recent history. Though evocatively edited, the experimental aesthetics of Van Sant’s recent efforts are pushed to the background. Milk is a mainstream, labor of love, and Van Sant has no interest in tarting up the story with extended steady cam shots or expressionistic sound collages (though there are wry nods to Kenneth Anger and David Hockney). Still, the film is mesmerizing, loving, optimistic and gloriously entertaining.
Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk is funny—cute and campy yet strong and resilient. It is a bravura performance and about as far removed from his minimalist work in Dead Man Walking as it is from the overtly method-y operatics of Mystic River. Delightfully light and airy and angry and contemplative, Penn delivers a beautifully modulated portrait of a flawed man out to change the world one neighborhood at a time.
The supporting roles are equally strong. A lot of love will be thrown at James Franco, and he is certainly more grounded in this role than anything I’ve seen him do before. There is both gravitas and grace in Franco’s work; it’s an unshowy, earthy performance. I was more surprised by Emile Hirsch. Playing Cleve Jones, a teenager who eventually jumpstarts the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the largest ongoing community arts project in the world, Hirsch is surprisingly and charmingly campy without relying on tired clichés. His is a well-etched, coming-of-age story from anti-authoritarian prick to political activist. Finally, a few words for Josh Brolin’s Dan White. For the most part, White is relegated to the sidelines. Van Sant’s film is not as interested in the murder trial as is the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk (I’d suggest reading Emily Mann’s documentary drama Execution of Justice, which is one hell of a play). Still, Van Sant is sympathetic to White’s character, and Brolin gives so much to the camera in only a handful of scenes that you can’t help but be haunted by his presence. It is an understated but troublingly dimensional performance.
I could go on but I won’t. It’s not perfect but Milk is a damn good film, and it seems to have arrived at the right moment in history. Let’s hope people watch.
Who would have thought that a film which ends with a double assassination would be the feel-good movie of the year? ‘Milk’ is thoroughly enjoyable, and genuinely uplifting, but it is also entirely conventional. I agree with Jeff that it was probably the right way to tell this story — actually, the story tells itself — but it has been a long time since Van Sant has made a film has looked so mainstream; the soundtrack is mostly unobtrusive, but keys our emotions, the camera lingers on the faces of the main characters (especially that of Penn, who is in practically every scene), the time line is more or less chronological. But I acknowledge that the story is too important, and too little known, to risk the audience distraction that might accompany a less mainstream treatment.
I have nothing to add to Jeff’s comments about the acting. The supporting roles are wonderful, without exception, and Sean Penn puts in one of his best performances. He is so often wasted, or worse, misused, forced (or choosing) to substitute anguish for acting. Here he does everything right, and his lack of prettiness focuses our attention on his face to great effect.
The political scientist in me would have liked the movie to step back from Milk a little and help us understand why he succeeded, when he did. There is actually very little politics in the movie. Was proposition 6 really defeated because gays came out of the closet to their friends, families and neighbors, and did they do that because Harvey Milk told them to? But the movie is not about gay politics in San Francisco in the mid-1970s; it is about Harvey Milk. Gays versus lesbians, rich versus poor, establishment versus street, all these divisions get brief mentions and are then resolved offstage.
And yet, ‘Milk’ is utterly compelling cinema. The character of Harvey Milk, as portrayed by Penn, just steamrolls his way through scene after scene, living through history and creating it at the same time.
we watched it last night. i agree about the quality of the performances all around, especially penn, who is great. however, while i am willing to concede that this may be a function of watching the film on dvd rather than in a theater, i didn’t actually find it very involving. i didn’t feel very much dramatic tension in the plot movement, and nor did the film move me very much (just the one shot of the candle-lit vigil at the end). this is not to say that i was bored; i did find it entertaining, but i have no desire to see it again.
oh, i forgot to write about this. we watched it a couple of weeks ago and, unlike you, arnab, i (we) found it exceedingly moving. (i’ve only read arnab’s brief comment because i want to get my impressions here before i see what other people have to say; maybe i’ll say something about y’all’s comments later). i found very moving that this is a film about a gay man who dies that is not a film about a gay man who dies. the anti-philadelphia, if you wish. sean penn’s harvey milk is so exuberantly, so consistently, so irrepressibly joyous and kind and positive, i drank him. he is the gay man i’d like to be if i were a man. he is the gay leader i’d like to be. and it is entirely possible this might border on the hagiographical, but what the heck, who cares? we need hagiographies of gay leaders! we have had hagiographies of all sorts of leaders, haven’t we? let the complexities and the darknesses be re-introduced once we have cleansed our palate of all the gay movies with fucked-up characters and more than 5 states (yay maine) have recognized the possibility of gay marriage.
i will complain, because i have to, about the basically absolutely lack of female faces. even the crowds are almost exclusively made out of young men, most of whom (complaint number two) are beautiful and beautifully shaped. striking to see the pics of the real people at the end. we were all A LOT thinner in the 70s. i would have liked, not for realism’s sake but for equality’s sake (the equality milk champions so fiercely in the movie and for which he died) to have seen scrawny un-built young men with unattractive and pimply faces. surely gus van sant could have found unattractive young extras at central casting? and, you know, i don’t really care if the castro didn’t have many women at the time. you’ve got to put women in the picture. you’ve got to find mothers and sisters and passersby and stick ’em in there. you can’t have a film about gay rights at this point in time and leave out the women.
okay, i’ve read the reviews about.
nice, jeff.
the emphasis on the castro is brilliant. the energy behind the effort to claim a “space of our own” really inspiring if, possibly, politically controversial (just as controversial as, say, the whole gay marriage issue). one of the most tense and breathtaking moments of the movie is when milk asks his staff to come out to their parents, there and then. wow.
the political scientist in me would have liked to see these questions addressed, too.
Alison Pill is also brilliant, but only because she is breaking/stealing my heart in HBO’s current season of “In Treatment.” This woman can act, and when I recently watched MILK for the second time on DVD, I was so excited to revisit her performance. GIVE ME MORE ALISON PILL!
yeah, didn’t really stand out in Milk.
Oh, that’s where I have seen her before. I too have been loving her performances in ‘In Treatment’ but I didn’t make the connection to ‘Milk.’
We need another thread on “In Treatment,” season one of which we just started watching and… whoa. Great.
But Milk — I’ll try not to rehash points raised:
–Gio’s right about the way this film gets a pass despite its hagiography, its operatic close; there’s a glory to seeing such nontraditional ‘content’ in such conventional form, particularly when (as Jeff first argued) the film seems despite that overdetermined biopic structure so vibrant, improvisational. So alive. Despite the looming sense of narrative closure, the film never seems trapped in that slide toward martyrdom, but rather resistant to such death-centric formulae. The film pays far more attention to pleasure and passion than to the portent of the BIG IMPORTANT LIFE.
–Still, the use of the phone call from the alienated boy–TWICE!–cut into the affect. I could handle so much else that was conventional, but this ploy seemed not just heavy-handed but artless. (I even believe that Milk was indeed, perhaps directly as well as indirectly, exactly that kind of salvational hero for so many people across the country. I just think dramatically it’s a dead-end. See above re portent and B.I.L.)
–I wish for the alternative versions of the film described by Gio (with as much attention to gender as to sexual orientation) and Chris (a film that was about the complexities and joys and heartbreaks of political organization… ‘though in this film Brolin/Dan White might not be so crucial, and I was once again so very impressed by Van Sant’s empathy and Brolin’s acting). And the documentary is so good, I still wonder why this version of the film had to be made… but I’m glad it was, and glad I saw it.