Milk

Milk

By Jonathan Fisher, January 31st, 2009



Harvey Milk was quite a man. He will be remembered as one of the founding fathers of the gay civil rights movement, and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office. He was also a prime example of how, occasionally in politics, a man (or woman) can come to symbolise a movement, and how an individual can inspire to an extent that no legislature could achieve. Milk offered change you could believe in.

Gus Van Sant's biopic Milk is a beautifully constructed personal portrait of the times of Harvey Milk (by the way, there's a documentary about Milk called The Times of Harvey Milk that is worth checking out). Sean Penn is the titular character, and once again he performs a theatrical loaves-and-fishes act. This role could have gone wrong in so many ways. It could have been too over-the-top (like Penn's performance in All the King's Men), it could have been overtly campy, or overtly earnest. Penn avoids all of the prat-falls that come with playing an eccentric inspirational figure, delivering one of the best performances of his career. In real life, Milk was renowned for his sense of humour and pleasant demeanour. Penn imbues his interpretation of Milk with a twinkle in his eye and mischief in his smile. This is not an abstract figure constructed of celluloid and words from a script -- this is a man we can care about.

The film begins with Milk dictating a letter that is to be played in the event of his death by assassination. We are given a brief outline of the movie's setting -- San Francisco in the 1970s, when gay people are ostracised to the point of being beaten by the police. We flash back to Harvey's 40th birthday, where he admits to his partner Scott (James Franco) that he hasn't done anything of note with his life. He and Scott move to San Francisco and open a camera shop on Castro Street. They quickly discover that the homosexual community in San Francisco and America generally is misunderstood and harshly treated. The police can't help them -- they're the ones that beat them within an inch or their life (or beyond an inch of their life) for 'blocking the sidewalk'. Harvey rallies for the gay community by speaking on street corners standing on a box marked with big broad letters, "SOAP".

Milk ran three times for election as a city supervisor before finally winning in 1977. The film shows the progression of Milk's political aspirations, the team that he assembled to help him win, and his personal life as his relationship with Scott breaks down because of Milk's professional ambitions. Emile Hirsch and James Franco are both very good in their roles -- Hirsch as a campaign organiser and Franco as Milk's partner -- but the central focus of the film is Harvey Milk. After the breakdown of Harvey and Scott's relationship, Harvey begins seeing a vulnerable and emotionally unstable Mexican American named Jack Lira (Diego Luna). It is baffling watching some of the things that Jack does -- why didn't Harvey cut it off with him? His compassion far outweighed his selfishness, I suppose.

When Milk is elected, he finds himself up against a formidable opponent in former police officer Dan White, played by Josh Brolin in yet another terrific performance. White firmly believes that homosexuality is a sin (despite essentially admitting closeted homosexual tendencies to Milk in a drunken confrontation) and campaigned for the biggest threat to the gay community, Proposition 6. If the bill had passed, employers would have been entitled to remove homosexuals from their organisations based on their sexual preference. Harvey Milk, along with former California governer (but not President -- yet) Ronald Reagan and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone (played here by Victor Garber), was one of the great campaigners against Proposition 6, going head-to-head with powerful gay-haters like Anita Bryant and State Senator John Briggs (Denis O'Hare). Despite being a gay icon, Milk banded together with people from all walks of life -- liberals, hispanics, unions, construction workers. Like the new US President, Milk was popular not entirely because of one aspect of his image, but almost with indifference to it.

Van Sant intersperses his narrative with a lot of documentary footage from the time that Milk served as city supervisor, and the final moments of the film are profoundly moving as we see firsthand the sheer number of people that Milk inspired. People like this film's screenwriter, the former closeted Mormon Dustin Lance Black, who was born in Sacramento around the time that Milk was politically active. As the credits roll, we are shown side-to-sides of the actors playing the characters with photos of the real people that inspired the film. I recognised in the brief footage we see of the real Harvey Milk in the credits the compassion and humour that was captured so perfectly by Sean Penn. Harvey Milk was a visionary and a trailblazer. He was also a man, a man whose personality was defined by much more than just his sexual orientation. Milk knows that.