Milk: After 30 Years, a Film Returns to a Harrowing Time in San Francisco

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2008/11/26/milk/


by Andrew O'Hehir

The man who blew up
America's closets


Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) and George Moscone (Victor Garber)

Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008 07:50 EST

For me and for anybody else who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s, the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone on Nov. 27, 1978, came as the second half of a traumatic double whammy -- a regionally and culturally specific version of 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. As I remember it, I was standing in the hallway outside the journalism office at Berkeley High School, talking to a couple of friends on the paper. (I was the editor.) We may well have been talking about stories we were working on in the aftermath of the so-called Jonestown massacre, the mass murder-suicide of more than 900 people, including quite a few with connections to our city and our school, that had happened just nine days earlier in the Guyanese jungle.

Someone came into the hall and told us what had just happened a few miles away, on the other side of the bay. A black-and-white TV was dragged out of the closet, plugged in and kicked around for a while until we could find a station. One of my friends took out a pencil and wrote on the wall: "11/27/78: Milk and Moscone just GOT SHOT!!" I guess he was blogging without knowing it. That scribble stayed there unmolested until after we graduated.

Thirty years later, almost to the day, and after a bewildering number of fits and starts with various directors and actors, the story of pioneering gay politician Harvey Milk -- a crucial strand, but not the only strand, in that chaotic autumn of 1978 -- reaches us as a major feature film, with Sean Penn in the lead role and Gus Van Sant behind the camera. There are an awful lot of things to say about "Milk," and it's a film that, for anyone who knows the history of these events, will bump into a bunch of questions it isn't remotely equipped to answer.

"Milk" was never going to be just another movie, and in a season marked by the simultaneous election of our first black president and the enactment of a gay-marriage ban in California, it's in danger of becoming primarily a symbol or a statement, and not a movie at all. (For instance, there is an announced boycott of Cinemark theaters showing the film, because of the chain owner's purported anti-gay politics.) But let's say the simplest things first: This is an affectionately crafted, celebratory biopic about a sweet, shrewd, hard-assed, one-of-a-kind historical figure. And they can just FedEx the Oscar to Sean Penn's house right now, so that we don't have to listen to his acceptance speech.

I don't know that this is Penn's best performance, overall -- let's have that debate some other time -- but as far as the mannered, immersive impersonations of his later career go, Harvey Milk takes the cake. Penn is such a powerful mimic that there's a certain danger in assigning him to play a well-documented public personality, especially one with Milk's quirks and tics. In a city of buff and beautiful gay men, Milk had funny hair, bad clothes (when he broke into politics, he bought three secondhand suits and wore them over and over again), a big honker and an abrasive Long Island accent. He was ferociously loyal to his friends and allies but could be ruthless toward others; his sweetness and compassion concealed a powerful will and a provocative, prankish sense of humor. Penn grabs all these qualities and rides them right to the edge of caricature before somehow, seemingly at the last instant, assembling them into a vital and complicated human character.

If Penn doesn'tbear a strong physical resemblance to Milk, that doesn't matter. It's a magical performance, one that turns a fairly ordinary up-with-people historical flick into a must-see. There were plenty of times during "Milk" when I stopped asking myself questions about Penn and the cinematography and the re-creations of San Francisco moments and locations (often in situ, as with Milk's camera shop at 575 Castro Street) and just got swept up into the enigmas of Harvey Milk's life and career and politics: Why is he doing that? Isn't that a political mistake? Or am I having a homophobic moment? How does Milk's legacy of combining confrontation and shrewd strategy relate to Martin Luther King? To Obama? How would Milk handle the aftermath of Prop. 8?

Actually, I have a pretty good idea how Milk would be doing that: He'd be fighting on all fronts at once, directing righteous anger into the streets and working behind the scenes on a longterm strategy to shame the majority population into reversing this decision. "Milk"  is essentially a history of its subject's six-year career in San Francisco politics, which both gives it a manageable focus and limits its possibilities. One thing Dustin Lance Black's script does exceptionally well is demonstrate how rapidly Milk evolved as a politician. A recent East Coast transplant, Korean War vet and Goldwater Republican who'd spent years halfway in the closet while working at New York financial jobs, the Milk of 1972 was a neighborhood businessman who thought that gay capital and gay consumers should seize their share of power in what was then (believe it or not) a relatively conservative city dominated by white-ethnic clan politics and the Catholic church.

By the time of his death, Milk was already a statewide political figure in a place known, then and now, as the leading edge of American politics. Certainly within the gay community he was a national populist hero well before he became a martyr. He had spearheaded the brilliantly successful campaign against the 1978 "Briggs initiative" (aka Prop. 6) -- more or less the Prop. 8 of its day -- which would have barred gay teachers, and potentially their non-gay friends and supporters, from jobs in California public schools.

As usual, Milk's strategy ran on at least two tracks: He sought to channel the anger and passion of burgeoning gay neighborhoods like the Castro or West Hollywood into political organizing, and he sought to systematically and patiently confront the straight majority with the stupidity and shallowness of its prejudice. As the movie depicts, he debated initiative sponsor John Briggs before a hostile crowd in the latter's right-leaning legislative district (where the initiative wound up failing). Together with schoolteacher Tom Ammiano (today a leading San Francisco politician, just elected to the state Legislature) Milk crafted the slogan "Come out, come out, wherever you are!" -- the idea being that if straight people understood how many gays they already knew and accepted on a personal level, their abstract bigotry would be significantly undermined.

It worked. All right, the fact that Republican presidential contender Ronald Reagan himself opposed the initiative gave an awful lot of white hetero conservative Californians cover to vote against it. But for me and, I imagine, millions of other people in the state, the spring of 1978 was full of minor revelations: one of my high-school teachers, a girl I bought coffee from sometimes, the guy at Whole Earth Access who knew the most about computers. I grew up in the most liberal city in the most liberal region of the country. I knew that gay people existed, over there across the bay in Harvey Milk's district. But until that year I didn't personally know any -- or rather, I didn't know I did.

In the famous tape-recorded testament that provides the spine to Black's screenplay, Milk says, "If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door." That was too much to ask, of course, but Milk's M.O. was always to make grand, idealistic pronouncements in public and then work like hell in private to accomplish whatever was realistic. Milk served only 11 months in elected office (as a San Francisco supervisor, the equivalent of a city councilman in other cities) and he certainly was not the first openly gay elected official in the United States -- although he may have been the first one elected on that basis. But his example was enormously powerful; if Milk didn't destroy the closet, he made it possible for gays who were out and proud to be leading public citizens for the first time.

In capturing '70s San Francisco and the explosive political movement that erupted around Harvey Milk, Van Sant relies on a large and lively supporting cast and cinematographer Harris Savides, who did such wonders with the place and period in David Fincher's "Zodiac."  It's a noteworthy contrast, because while "Milk"  is an appealing swirl of bodies and music and energy and (mostly) hopefulness, it lacks the mysterious vision that infused Fincher's film, the vision that made its California landscape seem both sun-kissed and death-haunted. Mind you, Van Sant isn't trying to make a dark film, or one haunted by death, despite the act of strange and terrible violence that ended Milk's life (and which we see here, in dreamy, silent, overly aestheticized fashion).

I can admire the professional flexibility that leads Van Sant from slow-motion, half-experimental works like "Paranoid Park"  or "Last Days"   to an inspirational, Oscar-season package like "Milk,"  but I wish he could split the difference between his two modes more effectively. He blends archival news footage (a lot of it from Rob Epstein's wonderful 1984 documentary "The Times of Harvey Milk" ) gracefully in with his newly shot material, and the re-creations of such historical events as Milk's rowdy 1977 election-night street party or his "Hope" speech on Gay Freedom Day in 1978 are flawless. There's a lot of warmth to "Milk,"  and a lot of the historical authenticity that comes from talking to the right people and shooting in the right places.

Even though Penn takes control of every scene he's in, Emile Hirsch is wonderfully vivid as Cleve Jones, a wide-eyed street kid from Phoenix whom Milk takes under his wing (and today a veteran San Francisco activist and politician). James Franco conveys the long-suffering composure of Scott Smith, Milk's ex-lover turned friend, and I really appreciated Joseph Cross' witty performance as Milk's whiz-kid political aide, Dick Pabich. (I worked with Dick at SF Weekly  in the early '90s; unfortunately he's not here today to be delighted by seeing himself receiving a blow job on the big screen.) The only thing I can say about the casting of artist Jeff Koons as Art Agnos, Milk's onetime political opponent and a future San Francisco mayor, is that Koons is fine and that to the small number of people familiar with both of those people's careers it will seem like the weirdest coupling imaginable.

What Van Sant and Black end up with here, even with Penn's above-and-beyond portrayal at its heart, is a solid, respectful, by-the-numbers historical picture. It's too smart to be simplistic or hagiographic -- Penn's Milk is, quite correctly, sometimes prickly and arrogant and has dubious taste in men -- but it still tries to construct a linear, coherent narrative out of events that don't necessarily make sense. To bring up the 800-pound gorilla we haven't been talking about, Josh Brolin does a wonderful job of making Dan White, Milk and Moscone's assassin, seem like a damaged and confused person rather than a homophobic monster. (After playing George W. Bush and Dan White, what's next for Brolin? Is a biopic of Nicolae Ceausescu in the works?)

Black's screenplay leans pretty hard on the peculiar idea that White, a married ex-cop and ex-fireman from what was then an old-line, white Catholic neighborhood, was damaged and confused in a particular way -- that he was a closet case who was obsessed with Harvey Milk. Granted, this isn't just Black's theory. It was also Harvey Milk's theory about White, as detailed in Randy Shilts' masterful book "The Mayor of Castro Street."  (Officially, "Milk"  does not use Shilts' book as source material, because the book was optioned for a different film that will probably never be made.) That doesn't mean that it explains anything, even if it's true, beyond the peculiar intensity of the two men's political and personal relationship, which was even stranger in reality than it is in the film.

White didn't go to San Francisco City Hall on Nov. 27, 1978, just to kill Harvey Milk. He shot Mayor George Moscone first, after all -- the first truly progressive mayor of San Francisco, now reduced to a footnote to history -- and then Milk. By his own admission, White also intended to kill Carol Ruth Silver, another liberal supervisor, and then-Assemblyman and future mayor Willie Brown, but lost his nerve.

White believed himself personally and politically slighted by all those people, and believed (correctly) that Milk and Moscone had seized the opportunity for a backroom power play when White resigned his seat on the board of supervisors and then tried to take it back. Beyond that, White saw a glimmering of something else: Milk and Moscone represented the birth of a new era of coalition politics in America's big cities, when the white-ethnic neighborhood machines were dying out and intensely negotiated partnerships between gays, African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, white yuppies and other groups would become the order of the day.

Dan White was a demented caricature of a Reagan Democrat -- admittedly a stereotype that didn't quite exist in 1978 -- a beaten-down working-class white populist driven insane by the rise of the urban, polycultural, gay-friendly left. By all accounts he was a lonely, intense oddball, not well liked in his own community, and he clearly tried to befriend Harvey Milk before deciding to kill him. But after the crime White was, at least briefly, embraced as a hero by many members of San Francisco's police department, which at the time remained a bastion of old-school Irish Catholic values and right-wing political views.

White's crimes were, in the moment, a nonsensical act of destruction directed by a paranoid individual against the entire world. I'm inclined to believe that on that day White's feelings about Harvey Milk's sexuality, whatever they were, played almost no role. Only in retrospect and in context -- that context being White's shockingly light sentence, the ensuing riots and the 30 years of contentious history that followed -- did the murder become a homophobic hate crime. (White himself committed suicide in 1985, about a year after his release from prison.)

Of course it's not fair to fault "Milk"  for not being as thoughtful and as complicated, or as profoundly tragic, as nonfiction works like Shilts' book or Epstein's film. It may be more surprising that Van Sant has made a film that's so clean and pretty, and that makes little effort to capture the darkness and craziness of that fall of 1978 in San Francisco. Part of me regrets all the other potential films about that history that we'll never see now. But "Milk" is good enough, thanks mostly to Penn's uncanny evocation, to bring Harvey Milk alive as a vital and highly relevant figure, rather than a distant political abstraction or gay saint. (He very definitely was neither.)

Milk in life was a complicated and highly intelligent man, but not one subject to philosophical deep thinking. His signature moment as a San Francisco politician (captured entertainingly in the film) was when he stepped in dog shit on purpose for the news cameras, in support of a pooper-scooper law that instantly made him a citywide hero. He always thought that his role was to bting hope to a ghettoized community with little sense of its own potential power, or to a runaway kid from Texas who was turning tricks on Polk Street because he had no self-esteem. Scooping up the shit and giving hope to the hopeless; that's change I can still believe in.

"Milk"  is now playing in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other major cities, with wide national release to begin Dec. 5.

― Andrew O'Hehir

[Artiste]

No more gay bashing in 2008 - I pray that this film will help for that !

[oilgun]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081125.wmilk1126/BNStory/Entertainment/home
Penn Magnetic as Milk
RICK GROEN

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

November 25, 2008 at 4:47 PM EST

Milk
• Directed by Gus Van Sant
• Written by Dustin Lance Black
• Starring Sean Penn, James Franco, Josh Brolin

*** (out of 4)
• 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.

[southendmd]

I'm going tonight to the Coolidge Corner Theatre, where I first saw BBM, also on opening night.

I'll try and report back later.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/movies/26milk.html?ref=movies

NYT Critics' Pick
(This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.)

Movie Review
Milk (2008)


Sean Penn, center, portrays Harvey Milk, the San Francisco city supervisor who was murdered in 1978.

November 26, 2008
Freedom Fighter in Life Becomes Potent Symbol in Death

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: November 26, 2008

One of the first scenes in “Milk”  is of a pick-up in a New York subway station. It’s 1970, and an insurance executive in a suit and tie catches sight of a beautiful, scruffy younger man — the phrase “angel-headed hipster” comes to mind — and banters with him on the stairs. The mood of the moment, which ends up with the two men eating birthday cake in bed, is casual and sexy, and its flirtatious playfulness is somewhat disarming, given our expectation of a serious and important movie grounded in historical events. “Milk,”  directed by Gus Van Sant from a script by Dustin Lance Black, is certainly such a film, but it manages to evade many of the traps and compromises of the period biopic with a grace and tenacity worthy of its title character.

That would be Harvey Milk (played by Sean Penn), a neighborhood activist elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977 and murdered, along with the city’s mayor, George Moscone (Victor Garber), by a former supervisor named Dan White (Josh Brolin) the next year. Notwithstanding the modesty of his office and the tragic foreshortening of his tenure, Milk, among the first openly gay elected officials in the country, had a profound impact on national politics, and his rich afterlife in American culture has affirmed his status as pioneer and martyr. His brief career has inspired an opera by Stewart Wallace, an excellent documentary film (“The Times of Harvey Milk,” by Rob Epstein, from 1984) and now “Milk,”  which is the best live-action mainstream American movie that I have seen this year. This is not faint praise, by the way, even though 2008 has been a middling year for Hollywood. “Milk”  is accessible and instructive, an astute chronicle of big-city politics and the portrait of a warrior whose passion was equaled by his generosity and good humor. Mr. Penn, an actor of unmatched emotional intensity and physical discipline, outdoes himself here, playing a character different from any he has portrayed before.

This is less a matter of sexuality — there is no longer much novelty in a straight actor’s “playing gay” — than of temperament. Unlike, say, Jimmy Markum, Mr. Penn’s brooding ex-convict in Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River,” Harvey Milk is an extrovert and an ironist, a man whose expansive, sometimes sloppy self-presentation camouflages an incisive mind and a ferociously stubborn will. All of this Mr. Penn captures effortlessly through voice and gesture, but what is most arresting is the sense he conveys of Milk’s fundamental kindness, a personal virtue that also functions as a political principle.

Which is not to say that “Milk”  is an easy, sunny, feel-good movie, or that its hero is a shiny liberal saint. There is righteous anger in this movie, and also an arresting, moody lyricism. Mr. Van Sant has frequently practiced a kind of detached romanticism, letting his stories unfold matter-of-factly while infusing them with touches of melancholy beauty. (He is helped here by Danny Elfman’s elegant score and by the expressive cinematography of Harris Savides, whose touch when it comes to framing and focus could more aptly be called a caress.)

In the years since the earnest and commercial “Finding Forrester”  (2000), Mr. Van Sant has devoted himself to smaller-scale projects, some of them (like the Palme d’Or-winning provocation “Elephant” ) employing nonprofessional actors, and none of them much concerned with soliciting the approval of the mass audience. “Gerry,” “Elephant,” “Last Days” and “Paranoid Park”  are linked by a spirit of formal exploration — elements of Mr. Van Sant’s experimental style include long tracking shots; oblique, fractured narratives; and a way of composing scenes that emphasizes visual and aural texture over conventional dramatic exposition — and also by a preoccupation with death.

Like “Elephant”  (suggested by the Columbine High shootings) and“Last Days”  (by the suicide of Kurt Cobain), “Milk”  is the chronicle of a death foretold. Before that subway station encounter, we have already seen real-life news video of the aftermath of Milk’s assassination, as well as grainy photographs of gay men being rounded up by the police. These images don’t spoil the intimacy between Harvey the buttoned-up businessman and Scott Smith (James Franco), the hippie who becomes his live-in lover and first campaign manager. Rather, the constant risk of harassment, humiliation and violence is the defining context of that intimacy.

And his refusal to accept this as a fact of life, his insistence on being who he is without secrecy or shame, is what turns Milk from a bohemian camera store owner (after his flight from New York and the insurance business) into a political leader.

“My name is Harvey Milk, and I want to recruit you.” That was an opening line that the real Milk often used in his speeches to break the tension with straight audiences, but the film shows him deploying it with mostly gay crowds as well, with a slightly different inflection. He wants to recruit them into the politics of democracy, to persuade them that the stigma and discrimination they are used to enduring quietly and even guiltily can be addressed by voting, by demonstrating, by claiming the share of power that is every citizen’s birthright and responsibility.

The strength of Mr. Black’s script is that it grasps both the radicalism of Milk’s political ambition and the pragmatism of his methods. “Milk”  understands that modern politics thrive at the messy, sometimes glorious intersection of grubby interests and noble ideals. Shortly after moving with Scott from New York to the Castro section of San Francisco, Milk begins organizing the gay residents of that neighborhood, seeking out allies among businessmen, labor unions and other groups.

The city’s gay elite, discomfited by his confrontational tactics, keeps Milk at a distance, leaving him to build a movement from the ground up with the help of a young rabble-rouser and ex-hustler named Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch).

For more than two lively, eventful hours, “Milk”  conforms to many of the conventions of biographical filmmaking, if not always to the precise details of the hero’s biography. Milk’s inexhaustible political commitment takes its toll on his relationships, first with Scott and then with Jack Lira, an impulsive, unstable young man played by Diego Luna with an operatic verve that stops just short of camp.

Meanwhile, local San Francisco issues are overshadowed by a statewide anti-gay-rights referendum and the national crusade, led by the orange-juice spokesmodel Anita Bryant, to repeal municipal antidiscrimination laws. The culture war is unfolding, and Milk is in the middle of it. (And so, 30 years later, in the wake of Proposition 8, is “Milk.” )

“Milk”  is a fascinating, multi-layered history lesson. In its scale and visual variety it feels almost like a calmed-down Oliver Stone movie, stripped of hyperbole and Oedipal melodrama. But it is also a film that like Mr. Van Sant’s other recent work — and also, curiously, like David Fincher’s “Zodiac,”  another San Francisco-based tale of the 1970s — respects the limits of psychological and sociological explanation.

Dan White, Milk’s erstwhile colleague and eventual assassin, haunts the edges of the movie, representing both the banality and the enigma of evil. Mr. Brolin makes him seem at once pitiable and scary without making him look like a monster or a clown. Motives for White’s crime are suggested in the film, but too neat an accounting of them would distort the awful truth of the story and undermine the power of the movie.

That power lies in its uncanny balancing of nuance and scale, its ability to be about nearly everything — love, death, politics, sex, modernity — without losing sight of the intimate particulars of its story.

Harvey Milk was an intriguing, inspiring figure. “Milk” is a marvel.



“Milk”  is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has some profanity, brief violence and a few discreet sex scenes.

MILK

Opens on Wednesday in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Directed by Gus Van Sant; written by Dustin Lance Black; director of photography, Harris Savides; edited by Elliot Graham; music by Danny Elfman; production designer, Bill Groom; produced by Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen; released by Focus Features. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes.

WITH: Sean Penn (Harvey Milk), Emile Hirsch (Cleve Jones), Josh Brolin (Dan White), Diego Luna (Jack Lira), Alison Pill (Anne Kronenberg), Victor Garber (Mayor George Moscone), Denis O’Hare (John Briggs), Joseph Cross (Dick Pabich), Stephen Spinella (Rick Stokes), Lucas Grabeel (Danny Nicoletta), Brandon Boyce (Jim Rivaldo), Zvi Howard Rosenman (David Goodstein), Kelvin Yu (Michael Wong) and James Franco (Scott Smith).

[Lynne]

At the moment, I don't find Milk scheduled for Jacksonville.  If it's like Brokeback Mountain's release, I should get to see it mid-to-late January.

Have fun, Paul!

[Kerry]

TIME magazine review:

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1862492-1,00.html

Milk: It's Good, and Good for You

By Richard Corliss Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008
 
Sean Penn stars as gay rights activist Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant's Milk Phil Bray / Focus Features.

Harvey Milk, the San Francisco gay activist who was murdered 30 years ago tomorrow, has a New York public school, a Georgia rock band and, as of this week, a Bay-area civil service building named for him. The first openly homosexual city supervisor in the U.S., he organized gays into a potent political force. Then there are the movies. Bryan Singer, director of X-Men and Superman Returns, is completing a Milk documentary, The Mayor of Castro Street. Today we get Milk, a hurtling, minutely researched, close-to-irresistible biopic starring Academy Award winner Sean Penn, whose performance is likely to be nominated for another Oscar, along with this film. That makes it official: Harvey Milk is the gay Joan of Arc.

A lot of kids today, especially the most conservative, may think of gays as some vague outlaw culture. But they might be surprised to learn that, when Harvey Milk was a young adult, gays were outlaws. The new movie begins with newsreel clips of men hiding their faces from the paparazzi's flash bulbs as police remove them from some furtive gay bar of the 1960s — the decade when practically every underclass of society got liberated but theirs. Vicious assaults of gays were common, and the law rarely pursued the perpetrators. If, as you watch Mad Men, you wonder why the gay art director is so timid about declaring his sexual needs to his colleagues, prospective lovers or, for that matter, himself, it's because he'd like to keep his job and his police record clean. (See TIME's 1978 feature story on the killings of Moscone and Milk)

The dominant pop culture certified homophobia. Gays and lesbians were depicted as predators in best-selling novels (A Walk on the Wild Side) and respected plays (The Killing of Sister George), and the films based on them. The plot dilemma of that age's serioso movies was often just the threat of being accused of homosexuality, as in Tea and Sympathy, The Children's Hour and Advise and Consent. The tone was sensation dressed up as sympathy.

And when a film did take a compassionate approach to homosexuality, the mainstream press could pounce on it with cavalier ignorance and captious contempt. A review of the British drama Victim, about a barrister fighting the law that made homosexuality a criminal offense, took offense at the movie's "implicit approval of homosexuality as a practice. ... Nowhere does the film suggest that homosexuality is a serious (but often curable) neurosis that attacks the biological basis of life itself. 'I can't help the way I am,' says one of the sodomites in this movie. 'Nature played me a dirty trick.' And the scriptwriters, whose psychiatric information is clearly coeval with the statute they dispute, accept this sick-silly self-delusion as a medical fact." The review, headlined, "A Plea for Perversion?", appeared in the Feb. 23, 1962, issue of TIME magazine.

The medical nonsense spouted here — which was also the stated position of the American Psychiatric Association — underlined a conformist culture's fear of the Other. They're different. They dress and talk funny. They're a threat to our spouses and our kids. The arguments against homosexuals, like those against blacks, meant to turn irrational suspicions into punitive legislation. To counter the know-nothing majority, members of the afflicted minority needed a righteous, urgent spokesman. Blacks had MLK — Martin Luther King, Jr. Gays had MiLK — Harvey Milk.

White/Milk

The Harvey Milk story needs little Hollywood embellishment; it's already the perfect outsider fable. A Manhattan investment banker raised on Long Island, Milk arrived in San Francisco in the early '70s. He opened Castro Camera in the rundown Castro district, which was fast becoming an enclave for the not-yet-outspoken gay culture. With the aid of an unlikely ally, the Teamsters, he organized a boycott of Coors Beer, which at the time refused to hire gays. After three losing Milk runs for a City Supervisor seat, he won in 1977, and a year later he helped defeat Proposition 6, which would have banned gay men and women from teaching in public schools. Through his efforts, gay society, high and low, coalesced into a politically effective movement. (You'll be reminded of a more recent band of outsiders who got an unlikely, charismatic candidate elected president.)

On Nov. 27, 1978, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were shot dead by Supervisor Dan White, an Irish-American Vietnam vet and former cop who had befriended Milk but opposed his agenda. Thousands of angry Milk-men filled the streets of San Francisco; their mourning turned to rioting. Diane Feinstein, president of the Board of Supervisors, succeeded Moscone as Mayor. Tried for murder, White pleaded diminished capacity due to depression and a junk-food diet — what became known as "the Twinkie defense." His conviction on the reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter triggered another night of riots. White served five years of his seven-year sentence and, the year after his release, committed suicide: carbon monoxide poisoning, in his car in his garage, a loop of "The Town I Loved So Well" playing on the tape deck. (See TIME's Top 10 Biopics)

White is so compelling and conflicted a figure that the trick of any Milk project is to keep him from abducting it. The 1984 documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk, devoted its whole third act to White's trial, which was the entire subject of Emily Mann's panoramic docudrama The Execution of Justice, also from 1984. Josh Brolin plays him here, and has much more to work with than he did as George Bush in W. This is a portrait, from the inside, of a man who fought the validation of homosexuality because his Catholic faith and his constituents wouldn't stand for it, and because, the movie suggests, he was roiled by unresolved gay issues of his own. ("I think he's one of us," Harvey whispers.) As a performance, it's Brolin's best since No Country for Old Men, which means very good indeed.
But Milk isn't about Dan White, except as a repository of the straights' resentment that dogged Milk and brought him down. The script by Dustin Lance Black, who worked on HBO's polygamy series Big Love (he was the only Mormon on the writing staff), is all about process: how Harvey Milk changed things. His style was charm mixed with genial bullying. He conveyed passion with good humor. In the movie, challenged by White to answer if two men can reproduce, he replies, "No, but God knows we keep trying. On the streets he'd pick up a bullhorn and shout, "My fellow degenerates... my name is Harvey Milk, and I'm here to recruit you." He pestered and seduced citizens into signing petitions, knocking on doors, getting out the vote of a segment so disenfranchised they'd never had anything or anyone to vote for before.

Designated a "gay politician," Milk was at least as much the latter as the former — a genius in convincing people that what he wanted was what they needed. So is the movie. It revels in showing how Milk built his campaign staff from the lovers and locals who wandered into Castro Camera; how he fought the city's gay establishment, until then discreet in identifying itself; how he debated John Briggs, the sponsor of Prop. 6, to a standstill and was instrumental in having the initiative defeated by more than a million votes. You've never seen this before: a movie that builds a state referendum into a suspenseful and agitating emotional climax. Ain't politics grand?

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

"I am not a candidate," Milk says in the movie. "The movement is the candidate." That was false modesty. In California he was the movement's star, its producer and director. And Penn dominates the film — not in his usual way, by making brooding seem like a form of higher calisthenics. Perhaps the least homosexual actor around, Penn here reins in his Method bluster to locate the sweetness and vulnerability beneath Milk's assured persona. He becomes this character — surely far from his experience — with no italicizing, no condescension, no sweat. This isn't an impersonation, it's an inhabiting.

In any early scene, Harvey shares a long, loving kiss with his future lover, Scott Smith (James Franco in a finely tuned turn). The kiss is director Gus Van Sant's declaration that, yes, this will be a gay movie. But there's no shock value, except in the tenderness of the passion — when was the last time you saw a great movie kiss?
Van Sant emerged as an indie filmmaker with pictures like Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho. These were set in the lower depths, populated with hookers and victims, sometimes ending in death. Those elements are here, mostly personified in Harvey's troubled lover Jack Lira (Diego Luna), as are Van Sant's old camera tropes of slo-mo and unsteady focus. But they aren't at the foreground, In the dichotomy between his audience-pleasing big movies (To Die For, Good Will Hunting) and his audience-resistant art films (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days, Punishment Park), Milk is securely in the former category. It's his most disciplined film — he was hired to direct Black's script, stuck to it, worked well with actors — and easily his best.

Harvey Milk lived with death threats. In the film, before one rally, he is handed a note reading, "You get the first bullet the minute you stand at the microphone." Black frames the film as a monologue delivered into a tape recorder by Harvey, who's as sure of his impending death as he is of his gay-liberation creed. In the '70s, paranoia was simply common sense; the preceding 10 years had seen the murders of King and Robert Kennedy, and assassination attempts on Gerald Ford and George Wallace. The movie is faithful to that grungy time, but it downplays the riots that followed its hero's assassination; Black and Van Sant don't want Milk to leave a sour taste. They've made a picture that is frankly celebratory, forthrightly inspirational. It's no less determined to get its message across than Harvey Milk was.

We've come a long way, baby, since 1978. Uncloseted homosexuals occupy seats in Congress, state legislatures and city councils; as author and political strategist David Mixner notes, "almost every state has at least one openly gay or lesbian elected official, including Alabama, Montana and Oklahoma." The gay subculture is a hip harbinger of official culture and can boast its own its own nationwide cable network in Logo (two if you count Bravo). Homocentric movies like Milk have replaced homophobic movies like Advise and Consent; and in TIME you read reviews like this instead of the 1962 review of Victim.

But some aspects of the national conversation between homosexuals and those who oppose or fear them haven't changed. "Gay" and "faggot" are widespread terms of abuse. Famous actors and singers won't declare their sexual orientation out of concern their careers would be kaput. There are camps with regimens to "cure" kids of gayness. John Briggs and his national counterpart, Anita Bryant, aren't spearheading the outspoken antagonism to gay civil rights, but the Mormon Church is. It poured $20 million into promoting Proposition 8, this year's California initiative to outlaw gay marriage. Fear lost in 1977; it won in 2008.

Three decades ago, Milk and his ilk were able to enlist President Jimmy Carter and future President Ronald Reagan in the gay fight against Prop. 6. But this fall, Barack Obama was all but mute on Prop. 8. Some community organizers, like the President-elect, are more cautious than others. It's a shame Harvey Milk wasn't around to recruit him.

[southendmd]

Just got back from "Milk".  A few thoughts.

***I'm not sure if anything below counts as spoilers, but I'll say it.  SPOILERS!  Maybe***




In an early sequence, archival footage of police raids of gay bars during the 60s, had me in tears.  Men mostly shielding their faces, yet one or two defiantly staring into the camera;  many being stuffed into paddy wagons.  Very powerful.  This is what Harvey Milk would be fighting against.

I've said elsewhere that I'm a big fan of the 1984 documentary "The Times of Harvey Milk".  "Milk" borrows heavily from the documentary, and follows a good chunk of its structure.  In fact, many instances of footage included in the documentary were simply recreated with actors.  I found myself thinking, why did "Milk" even have to be made?  To me, "Times" was sparer, less sentimental, and ultimately, more effective and more moving.  "Milk" does flesh out Harvey's life, and his motley inner circle.  But I found it too hero-worshipful.  I think the blame lies with the script.  Sean Penn does his best to inject some nuance and dimension that just isn't in the script. 

Penn's performance is less of an impression than an interpretation.  While his gestures and mannerisms look studied, the voice is his own, not resembling Harvey's at all.  I suppose if one had never heard Harvey, Penn's voice is what they might imagine--passionate, and with a New York twang.  (I found Harvey's voice actually to be more patrician.)  He does capture Harvey's joie de vivre very well, but risks portraying him as a do-gooder who would take in any stray cat that came his way. 

The kisses and sex scenes are pretty tame.  (Makes me wonder what Van Sant would have done with Brokeback...)

Harvey anticipated his own assassination, and the film uses his recording a statement about this as a framing device, so that Harvey "tells" us the story. 

The period details were terrific.  However, the music was distracting and incongruous most of the time.  The period music was fine, but Danny Elfman's score seems pulled from some other, melodramatic film.  (Contrast to Mark Isham's wonderful, spare score to "Times".)  The opera bit was beyond heavy-handed.  (Meryl?!)

James Franco was soulfully terrific as Harvey's soulmate; Emile Hirsch was initially over-camp, but toned it down to an effective performance as Cleve Jones.  I thought James Brolin lacked the naivete and pathetic, desperate nature of Dan White, although he did well in a brief drunk scene.

The epilogue features a sort of "where they are now" sequence:  shots of the actors juxtaposed with photos of the actual people.  While I liked it, it did smack of "look how good we were at casting".

Now I want to go back and re-read "The Mayor of Castro Street" and wonder if that film will ever be made. 

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Thank you, Paul, for the review. I hope I can see it tomorrow! I also want to try and watch "The Times of Harvey Milk" over the holiday weekend. Amazingly, I saw it when it first came out, um, a quarter of a century ago--???--!!! Well, it's about time, that's for sure.

Thanks again!

[Meryl]

The kisses and sex scenes are pretty tame.  (Makes me wonder what Van Sant would have done with Brokeback...)

The period details were terrific.  However, the music was distracting and incongruous most of the time.  The period music was fine, but Danny Elfman's score seems pulled from some other, melodramatic film.  (Contrast to Mark Isham's wonderful, spare score to "Times".)  The opera bit was beyond heavy-handed.  (Meryl?!)

Thanks for your insights, Paul.  You seem to have liked it less than I did, but then I've never seen the documentary.  The movie probably suffers from the comparison.

I am glad that Van Sant didn't direct "Brokeback."  It would have been a very different film.  It's incredible how just the right people were drawn together to make that film what it was, not the least of whom was Gustavo Santaolalla.  That music was so spare and intelligent and atmospheric; it really reflected Proulx's prose beautifully.  I agree that Elfman's score didn't fit "Milk" very well.  It kept jumping out at me instead of drawing me in even deeper.

The opera bits were also curious.  Clearly, "Tosca" must have been Harvey Milk's favorite opera.  Years ago I worked on the operatic version of Harvey's story, and I seem to remember some "Tosca" references in that, too.  The scene where Harvey is watching the death of Cavaradossi was meant, I guess, to foreshadow his own death.  Spoletta, who comes in at the climax, looked an awful lot like Dan White, which had to have been on purpose.  But I don't know why Van Sant had him looking at the marquee of the opera house with "Tosca" advertised on it as he was dying.  It just doesn't seem that important to bring up at that moment.