Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
1/20/09
I graduated from a middle-of-nowhere
Pennsylvania high school in 1990. Any gay classmates I had were triple-locked
inside their closets, “queer” was still the world's most cutting insult,
and our teachers were a hell of a lot quicker to speculate that AIDS was
God's punishment for, you know, than to teach us anything about the history
of the gay civil rights movement. As such, my knowledge of Harvey
Milk was limited mostly to a vague recollection that he was some 70's politician
(couldn't have actually told you he was gay) who was assassinated by some
guy who said Twinkies made him do it. So, along comes Gus Van Sant's
Milk, a respectful, restrained and quite interesting biopic that
takes us through the process by which a closeted, 40 year-old nobody found
a calling that allowed him to make the world a better place. The
movie's a bit wonky, lingers on unimportant details and could have stood
to be a bit more fiery, but Sean Penn's atypically warm and gregarious
performance leads an excellent cast in recreating a slice of 70's history
that doesn't get its' due.
It's 1970. On his 40th
birthday, New York office worker Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) picks up much
younger and much less closeted Scott Smith (James Franco) in the subway.
The two hit it off big time and decide to move to San Francisco, where
they open a camera shop on predominantly gay Castro Street. But even
though he's part of the majority now, Harvey is disappointed to find that
prejudice from other business owners and brutality from local cops (pretty
much any homosexual activity was illegal at this time) still make being
“out” a difficult proposition. So, he begins to organize the locals,
creating lists of gay-friendly businesses and helping the Teamsters enforce
a boycott of Coors Beer in exchange for friendlier hiring policies.
Power suits Harvey, who decides to run for office with a ragtag organization
that recruits workers like Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch) off the street.
After a defeat as a pot-friendly gay symbol of 60's liberalism, he comes
back two years later with a business suit and a more focused platform,
but loses again. Two years later, another defeat but on the same
day a referendum allows local election of City Supervisors. So two
years later, Harvey Milk becomes California's first openly gay elected
official. He faces two immediate challenges: the peculiar,
obsessive fellow Supervisor Dan White (Jose Brolin), and a national crusade
led by Orange Juice pitchwoman Anita Bryant (“playing” herself in archival
footage) to stomp out all inroads in gay rights. In California, it
takes the form of Proposition 6, which would require school districts to
fire gay teachers, and any others who supported them. Harvey crusades
tirelessly against Prop. 6, but while he fully understands the threat Anita
Bryant poses to his movement, he tragically underestimates the madness
lurking inside Dan White.
Milk was consistently
interesting to me if for no other reason because of how little of this
history I actually knew. We've certainly come a long, long way since
the legally enforced homophobia of the early 70's, even if Proposition
6 eerily echoes another California Proposition that recently had a lot
more success. Harvey Milk was certainly on to something when he campaigned
for gays to emerge from their closets: the right to be gay in secret
is completely untenable since if people don't know any homosexuals, they
will always assume that the group is off somewhere in the shadows up to
no good. The novelty of this particular kind of civil rights story
is considerable, since mainstream Hollywood has completely avoided it up
to now.
The acting is top-notch.
Penn is among the most macho of actors, best known for playing the kind
of guys who've got a gurgling rage in their stomachs ready to explode on
random passers-by. Here, he's pretty much the anti-Penn; friendly,
charming, squishy. The actor completely disappears into this role.
Brolin is also outstanding as Dan White: we'll never know for certain
why he did what he did, but Dustin Lance Black's screenplay gives airtime
to most of the theories and Brolin does a great job striking a pitch of
squirly offness that allows any or all of them to be correct depending
upon how you look at it. People say this all the time, but this time
I really mean it: until the end credits rolled, I could not tell
which one was Emile Hirsch, and his Cleve Jones walks a perfect path from
shiftless partier to political power broker. Franco does good things
with a mostly thankless role: you can imagine Scott being someone
who'd inspire Harvey to be a better person even if he ultimately tires
of the results. On the other hand, I really wish the movie didn't
spend so much time with Harvey's final boyfriend, the unbalanced Jack Lira.
Diego Luna does all he can with the role, and I understand the importance
of having such an important part of the title character's life around,
but the movie keeps going back to queasy scenes of Harvey and Jack fighting
in the middle of the grand political theater going on around them.
And while the Harvey/Scott relationship has real emotional heft, the movie
could never persuade me that Jack was any more than a fling, albeit a tragic
one.
Other than eliciting so many
great performances (as he tends to do), Gus Van Sant's greatest achievement
behind the camera is a formidable summoning of time and place. This
never seems like “let's put on the 70's,” always a hard sell when you're
replicating such a fashion-challenged decade. I also liked the use
of archival footage to “play” some of the more famous characters like Bryant,
Diane Feinstein and Ronald Reagan. One thing I didn't particularly
care for was a preference for passive medium and long shots over closeups.
Perhaps he's trying to make us feel like we're in the room with Harvey's
inner-circle, but I found much of the way the action is staged to be distancing.
Black's screenplay crackles with fascinating details about the hard life
faced by gays in the 70's and the shifting political forces that began
to turn things around. But it also is really entertained by the minutia
of campaigning, even when Harvey runs the same campaigns over and over,
and I wished for a tighter focus.
Nit-picking aside, Milk
is a surprisingly entertaining civil rights drama in large part because
Harvey Milk, as played by Sean Penn, is such a fun guy to spend two hours
with. You can see why people rallied around him and how he helped
to change history. It's a must-see for anyone too young to remember
these events, and should also serve as a rallying cry for those opposing
anti-gay ballot measure all across the country. Harvey Milk, who
never met an act of political theater he didn't like, would have loved
that. |
