Powerful and effective

Rating: 9/10 (30 November 2008)

Ignoring the experimental dream-like cinema that marked Elephant, Last Days, and Paranoid Park, in Milk director Gus Van Sant uses conventional biopic techniques to depict the life of Harvey Milk, the San Francisco entrepreneur who became the first openly gay man elected to public office. Employing a less-than-effective framing device that shows Milk talking into a tape recorder at the beginning and end, the film also relies on archival footage to make its point, showing police abuses against gays and Diane Feinstein announcing the assassination of Milk and Mayor Moscone outside San Francisco's City Hall in 1979.
Borrowing one of Milk's frequently used introductions to his speeches, the tag line for the film might be "I'm Gus Van Sant and I'm here to recruit you". In the film, Van Sant wants to introduce Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) to a new generation who know him only as a footnote and, in the process, to gain mainstream adherents for the cause of gay rights. In that, he largely succeeds, though the film tends to reinforce homophobic stereotypes by allowing overly effeminate and flamboyant characters to dominate. Sean Penn's polished performance as Harvey Milk is the highlight of the film and one sure to be remembered at Oscar time.
He makes the outspoken businessman a plausible and even lovable hero despite his insecurities. Also impressive is Josh Brolin as Supervisor Dan White and Emile Hirsch as street-walker turned political activist Cleve Jones. Opening in New York in 1970, Milk touches briefly on Harvey's pickup of a much younger Scott Smith (James Franco), at a subway station, and follows their relationship to their establishment of a camera store on Castro Street in San Francisco. Though Scott was Milk's live-in lover for many years and ultimately his first campaign manager, little attempt is made to show him or other peripheral characters in much depth, identifying them only by their sexuality and support of the movement that Harvey built from the bottom up.
Depicting the growth of the gay community in the area that centered on Castro Street, Van Sant captures the entrepreneurial spirit of the gay businesses that flourished on the street, yet he avoids the not-so-attractive aspects of the area that became in essence a sexual ghetto  its conformity of dress and speech, the proliferation of gay bars and bath houses in the neighborhood, and its toll of alienated and depressed inhabitants. Harvey's mission from the outset of his political career was to encourage homosexuals to come out of the closet. "The blacks", he said, "did not win their rights by sitting quietly in the back of the bus. They got off! Gay people, we will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets... We are coming out! We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions! We are coming out to tell the truth about gays!" Milk's two losing campaigns for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and his close defeat in his race for the State Assembly did not dim his determination or sense of purpose, however; yet it was only when districts were reapportioned to ensure neighborhood preferences that Milk was able win election as a Supervisor. He became more than a one-issue official, lending his support to unions and the urban poor, his populism reflecting the basic belief that rebuilding neighborhoods was essential to achieve the American Dream. Milk organized his constituency into an effective political force which effectively faced the challenge of fighting Proposition 6, a statewide initiative to prohibit gays from teaching in the public schools, effectively legalizing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
While Milk is a message movie that unabashedly promotes a point of view, it transcends didacticism to become a human statement about the struggle of all people to achieve dignity, acceptance, and basic human rights and its depiction of the torchlight parade of 30,000 people to San Francisco City Hall on the night of the assassination is a magic moment. The film begins and ends with Milk expressing his love for another human being, a statement that the success of the gay rights movement will be ensured only when people are seen as human before they are seen as gay or straight. Ironically, that may happen only when the gay and the straight identities are subsumed into a broader understanding of what it truly means to be human.