Milk

Milk (***1/2)

Milk is a good movie, but its kinda gay. Thanks, I'll be here all week.

In all series, Milk is an excellent biopic of Harvey Milk, who became the United States' first openly gay public official when he was elected to San Francisco's board of supervisors. It would be a good movie in any context, but seems especially resonant having come out a few months removed from an election that saw Proposition 8--specifically amending the State Constitution to define marriage as one man and one woman--be put on the ballot and pass in California. Sean Penn is likely to give series competition to Mickey Rourke from The Wrester for the Oscar nod for Best Actor (Penn won the SAG award, Rourke won the Golden Globe), and its easy to recognize why he's in the running. Penn's performance is certainly the most striking thing about the movie, but it has a lot more going for it than that, with several other good performances and an excellent job of directing by Gus Van Saint.

After a brief overture of sorts showing headlines and photos from police raids on gay bars in the
'60s, the movie opens with Harvey Milk talking into a tape recorder, recording a message that is to be played in the event of his assassination. It then flashes forward to the real-life footage of Diane Feinstien announcing that Milk was, indeed, assassinated, along with the mayor of San Francisco, then flashes back about a decade to Milk on his 40th birthday, before he enters the political arena. Here we see Harvey seemingly randomly meet up with Scott (James Franco), a man who is much younger, but who Harvey manages to coax into a relationship. They open a camera shop together, not really hiding the fact that they're more than just business partners. After another store owner tells them in the nicest way possible, "We don't like your kind around here!" Harvey decides to form an alliance with other businesses with gay owners in the area. They get their big break when they form a pact with the Teamsters union to boycott Coors beer.

The attention Harvey is able to garner from this allows him to launch his first political campaign, in which he gets his ass handed to him. However, he gradually builds up a base amongst the gay citizens of San Francisco, and then begins to slowly work his work towards building a coalition of other disenfranchised groups (the poor, the elderly, etc.). As he begins to focus more and more time with his political career, his relationship with Scott--who is exhausted by the whole idea of campaigning--becomes strained, eventually ends, and Harvey meets another, much younger man named Jack and starts a relationship with him which runs into similar problems. The whole "work/relationship" balance part of the story feels pretty cliche (aside from the fact that its generally people of the opposite sex arguing with each other), but for all I know, how it was portrayed in the movie was exactly how it happened in real life so I don't know how much I can really criticize it. At any rate, I felt it was probably the least engaging aspect of the film.

In the second half of the film, we meet Dan White (Josh Brolin), Harvey's eventual killer. Harvey posits that White might be a closeted homosexual, even though he's married with children. If it is in fact the case that he's gay, White certainly isn't ready to admit it to anyone, and doesn't seem ready to fully embrace Harvey's doctrine of equal rights for everyone either. Nevertheless, he's a schrewd politican, and tries to warm of to Harvey and meet him halfway on some of his proposals. When Harvey doesn't follow through by giving Dan his vote on a piece of legistlation (because he sees his gay rights bill as pretty much hopeless regardless of Dan's support), Dan feels betrayed. Our first sense that Dan might not quite be all on the level comes when Dan shows up to Harvey's birthday party stumbling drunk. We see Dan a few more times before his eventual murder of Harvey, but he doesn't quite feel like a complete character. Gus Van Saint was probably trying to avoid making it obvious what was going to occur in the end for people who didn't know the Harvey Milk story, but I think someone who is as important as White is to the eventual conclusion of the story should have more front-and-center screen time and less just sort of existing around the periphery.

I'm of the opinion that in order for a biopic to be any good, it has to be more than just the life story of its main character, however interesting of a life that may be. There's plenty of crappy made-for-cable-TV movies that more or less accurately tell the story of an interesting person's life, but are nevertheless complete piles of crap. A successful movie has to have a larger and more profound idea encompassing it. In the case of Milk, the plot certainly is tied to Harvey Milk's start in politics, following him throughout his rise in success up to his eventual assassination, but it has a lot more going on than that. The movie ties Harvey Milk's struggle to the larger struggle for tolerance that is still ongoing, and its also sort of a celebration of grassroots activism in all its forms. When Harvey rallies the first of his supporters in his first attempt to run for office, we see him literally set up a soap box in the middle of the street to use as a platform. Later in the movie, when Harvey is already a public figure, he hands his bullhorn to Cleve, a younger gay man who he manged to persuade to join the movement earlier in the film, as sort of a symbolic passing of the torch for the "voice of the streets," since Harvey had essentially left the streets.

There are also extremely obvious parallels between the film's depiction of Proposition 6, which concerned protections for homosexuals from being fired from their jobs, and the modern day Proposition 8, which specifically banned gay marriage in the California constitution. In each case, many of the main players on the side seeking to continue quelling gay marriage didn't actually live or work in California, and merely decended upon the state to persuade Californians to vote their way on the proposition. In the film, leading Evangelical leaders from the '70s are seen in archival TV footage scaring the hell out of people with fire and brimstone sermons and insisting that homosexuality simply isn't Godly. Similarly, Proposition 8 passed last year in California in large part because of a massive spending spree by ultra right-wing groups like James Dobson's Focus on the Family. Preconcieved notions we see in the film regarding gay people being inherently preverse, and wanting to work in schools so they can "recruit" young children still exist today. Harvey Milk's message of tolerance and understanding was a simple one, but obviously not one that many people have really gotten yet.

Sean Penn's performance is easily the best thing going for Milk, he clearly gets himself lost in the character and gives Harvey's lines a great deal of power. The rest of the film is interesting, and has more going on than a lot of biopics, and has a certain importance to it because of how prescient the subject matter still is, but some of the other characters seem to get lost in the periphery and aren't as memorable as they could be. Its a very good movie, but perhaps not a masterpiece.