Milk

All right, first things first: for the uninitiated, Milk is not a documentary about moo juice. Instead, it’s a biopic about Harvey Milk, the country’s first openly gay man elected to a major political office. The film begins with documentary footage of civil rights movement clashes, then follows young-ish aspiring politician Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) as he tries (and often fails) to achieve political power and a voice for gay rights. An unlikely activist, Milk manages through savvy politics and populist appeal to eventually win a position as City Supervisor in San Francisco.

Milk uses the true story of Harvey Milk’s personal and political life as a prism into the genesis of the modern gay rights movement. In that regard, Milk tries to be (and to some degree is) a blending of documentary and biography. That’s all well and good, but one of the limitations of a biopic is that the person more or less is the story.

Sean Penn’s portrayal of Harvey Milk is excellent; the actor dissolves into Milk’s body and persona with seeming effortless ease. There’s not a moment when Penn the actor peeks out, and it’s his best role in years. James Franco appears as one of Milk’s lovers, and Josh Brolin, himself the star of Oliver Stone’s recent film about George W. Bush, is brilliant as fellow San Francisco supervisor Dan White.

Despite Penn’s acting and a sharp script by Dustin Lance Black, Harvey Milk is not inherently a terribly compelling character in the film. He’s interesting, his tumultuous love life is truly tragic, and he was a pioneering gay rights activist, but compared to other recent biopic films such as Ali, W., Ray, and Walk the Line, Milk doesn’t really have the larger-than-life persona (or life story) to make a great film.

As the film acknowledges, Harvey Milk was not killed because he was gay, nor because of his gay rights activism. Milk was killed (along with a heterosexual San Francisco mayor) for what was basically a political backstabbing; Milk had pressured the mayor not to reappoint a political rival.

Milk would have had a stronger narrative and been more interesting if it had also dealt with what happened after Milk’s death (his assassin claimed he was insane at the time because of junk food, and the case launched the term “Twinkie defense”). The script didn’t go into that, wanting to focus on Harvey Milk and his work instead of the fate of his killer, but perhaps it should have. Good filmmakers (and screenwriters) have to go where the interesting story is, even if it meanders from the original idea.

Milk was directed by Gus Van Sant, whose work, frankly, is very uneven. He has flashes of brilliance (such as with My Own Private Idaho), amid a much larger sea of self-indulgent “artistic” pretension (such as Elephant, Gerry, and his pointless remake of Psycho). Van Sant finds enough self-restraint to keep Milk on an even keel, and the results are workable if unremarkable.

Milk is the first major gay-themed film since Brokeback Mountain, and will be interesting to see how well received the film is. If people don’t go, it may not reflect any anti-gay bias, but simply the sense that the subject is not of particular interest, much as how people who are not fans of jazz might avoid the Clint Eastwood film Thelonius Monk: Straight, No Chaser, and how people who are not NASCAR fans might stay away from the upcoming biopic of racer Dale Earnhardt.

Though Milk has its faults, it is extremely well acted and very timely, with the recent battle over the gay rights measure Proposition 8.