Fresh and moving, if not wholesome, Milk

Rating: 9/10 (3 December 2008)

Daring but not over the top, Gus Van Sant’s ode to the fallen gay-rights activist Harvey Milk is compelling, moving, and elegaic, successfully melding the hope of Milk’s drive for equal rights for homosexuals with his tragic death. Van Sant’s masterpiece, certain to be noticed around Oscar time, is poignant enough to mist even the most hardened of souls while remaining frighteningly relevant even thirty years after Milk’s murder.
To be fair, writer Dustin Lance Black had wonderful source material from which to derive his screenplay, as Milk’s life was anything but placid, but he was able to tell his tale without getting sappy or maudlin, without the film’s devolution into a whitewash. But although Black’s screenplay is par excellence, this is Sean Penn’s show. Penn has grown so much as an actor, even though most film critics still note his seminal Jeff Spicoli performance from 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Here, he disappears into the role of Harvey Milk, adapting some stereotypical - but not unheard of - mannerisms of gay men, but never going over the top, never coming close to lampooning his own subject. Penn’s grip on Milk’s inner psyche is devastatingly raw; he shows how much Milk cared about equality for all, even at the expense of life with his lover, Scott Smith (a pensive James Franco). This is a canard seen in many biopics, but here Penn’s Milk is not unaffected by how he affects others; he is not single minded, he is merely driven.
Even though he has comparatively little screen time, Josh Brolin is Penn’s equal as Milk’s twisted - and also quite conflicted - fellow city supervisor, Dan White. Since this is a biographical movie, it’s not spoiling things to tell you that White is heavily involved in Milk’s murder, but at no point does Brolin make you think he’s just a hardheaded antigay jackass who’s out to bust anyone who’s not white and “normal.” But it’s not important how Milk dies, because the focus here is his life’s work and how it affected not only the gay community - in San Francisco and nationwide - but also the straights, particularly singer Anita Bryant, who got it into her pretty little head in the mid-1970s that God hates gays, and therefore gays shouldn’t get any rights at all. Her crusading begins in Florida, where she was once a popular orange-juice pitchwoman, and leads all the way to Milk’s backyard.
Set against the backdrop of the turbulence that gestated in the late 1960s and grew to angry fruition in the 1970s, Milk captures the feel of the period, sans sanctimony and hand wringing. Penn’s work here should notch him his fifth Oscar nomination, perhaps even his second win; Van Sant should also get his second nomination as well. There really isn’t much negative to say about Milk, unless you’re bigot who’s ashamed of how well Milk makes the case for equal rights for everyone.