13
- Milk
- Directed by Gus Van Sant
- Written by Dustin Lance Black
- Starring Sean Penn, James Franco, Josh Brolin
- Classification: 14A
The archival footage in the opening frames doubles as a blunt reminder, a return to a time, not long ago, when the headlines routinely blared: "Homosexuals and Police Clash" or "Crackdown on Homosexual Bars." Then, to be gay in public was to invite a nightstick from your local cop, a pink slip from your righteous employer, an eviction notice from your scowling landlord.
Revisiting that era of the seventies, and profiling one of the cause's most visible martyrs, Milk is a worthy docudrama that is solid if not sublime. But, sometimes, a merely good film can brush up against greatness, and this one does so twice — in Sean Penn's magnetic performance and in the cautionary tale's contemporary resonance, in the lingering caveat that gains are reversible and hard-won civil rights must be just as vigorously defended against renewed attacks and casual erosion.
The martyr, of course, is Harvey Milk, who starts out on more humble ground. Reaching a milestone birthday, he picks up a guy on the subway and, that night in bed, confesses in all sincerity: "I'm 40 years old and haven't done a thing I can be proud of." Less than a decade later, "pride" would become an entire movement; as a supervisor in San Francisco, Milk would become the first openly gay man elected to public office; and, on the steps of City Hall, Dianne Feinstein would break the tragic news: "Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk have been shot and killed." From middle-aged nobody to assassinated icon in eight short years — that's the movie's narrative arc.
Its director, Gus Van Sant, has spent his own career travelling between the margins and the mainstream, and has grappled before with gut-wrenching headlines, most profoundly in Elephant. There, dramatizing the Columbine massacre, he transcended journalism's easy paradigms, burrowing down into those deeper layers of complexity where certainty shrinks but understanding grows. Here, there's none of that nuance or layering. Instead, working from Dustin Lance Black's script, Van Sant settles for a more conventional approach — showing us the birth of a sainted crusader, then marking off the stations of his pilgrimage.
They begin with his move to San Francisco accompanied by his then-lover Scott (James Franco). The two open a camera shop in the Castro district, which soon expands into a meeting place for gay activists and subsequently into the campaign headquarters for Milk's several attempts at political office. All failed until his breakthrough in 1977, when, on the council, he proved himself a skilled pol adroit at forging practical alliances to promote his agenda. When he and the mayor died, it was at the hands of a fellow supervisor, Dan White, who would later kill himself. Ultimately, Milk was victimized not by the homophobia he fought but by a less common malady rooted in a singularly disturbed mind.
Yet that is all part of the historical record — in that sense, the picture is more remembrance than revelation. Any nuance that exists can be traced directly to Penn, who does for the character what the script doesn't — hint at an inner dramatic conflict, at underlying swirls of emotion. Using an altered nose to elongate his face, Penn vibrantly conveys the essential energy of the man, the combination of relentless determination and innate likeability that could disarm even his most ardent opponents. However, with a sad glance here, a muted gesture there, he also suggests that Milk's political activism was a fierce commitment in the public realm but also a welcome reprieve from his private world, from an often chaotic personal life where relationships turned sour or never matured beyond shallow attraction.
Yet Penn is on his own here — the film doesn't venture far into psychological terrain, preferring to concentrate on the social climate of the time, reacquainting us with exactly what Milk was fighting against and for. Like the suicidal kid in Minnesota, forced by his parents to have his "sickness" treated by medical professionals. Like the Anita Bryants or the John Briggs and their "propositions" to strip gays of their civil rights and belt them with the Bible. No doubt, this return to yesterday's battles sheds a useful light on today's: The propositions, and the attitudes behind them, have changed, but they haven't disappeared.
The exception to this sociological rule is the depiction of Dan White, who, in Josh Brolin's hands, emerges as a tortured figure himself, no paper villain. At one point, Milk insinuates that "he may be one of us," and their scenes together bristle with a fascinating tension that goes well beyond the merely political. But then it's back to the trod path of the standard biopic, including a few sequences that, atypically for Van Sant, border on bathos. For example, when, on the last night of his life, our doomed hero attends an opera and the fat lady sings, things can be considered pretty much over.
Once the end officially arrives, Milk has finished its workmanlike job and we can carry on. Really, our duties here are twofold — to revel in Penn's artistry and to remember that lingering caveat. Why heed the warning? Because Harvey Milk campaigned on the audacious slogan of "Hope for a better tomorrow," and, through a succession of tomorrows, that slogan has clearly lost neither its utility nor its urgency.