Sean Penn is Milk!

Rating: 9/10 (2 December 2009)

I use the word portray often when writing these comments, because "playing" a part that might be drawn from real people is leaving room for some playfulness that "portraying" an actual human on stage or screen shouldn't allow. A moral responsibility is undertaken with the acting challenge of transforming a real person's life story into a performance.
And the performance Penn gives comes as close as possible to reincarnating the man who remains one of the most significant figures of 20th century America. Harvey Milk helped galvanize the spirits and activism of millions, not just gay but anybody concerned with honesty in government, police brutality, reforming the drug laws, cleaning up the streets and not penalizing the entire lives of those who didn't fit into the radical right wing's vision of the future.
Director Gus Van Sant and the other actors deliver brilliantly, showing things as they were concerning the changing nature of San Francisco and the whole world meant having to confront the bigotry that was in full flight then and still is to an awful degree today. Emile Hirsch (portraying Cleve Jones) is one of the best young actors in the world and Josh Brolin gives another spot on exploration into the dark side of modern man.
His Dan White was, shall we say, more active, with successive careers and otherwise, than the average man ever imagines being. The assassin of Milk and Mayor George Moscone (Victor Garber) was in the military, then became a firefighter and police officer before entering city politics. Whatever demons drove White to his ultimate fate remain known only to him (though at one point, Milk offers his own theory).
"Milk" is best appreciated with a viewing of Rob Epstein's "The Times Of Harvey Milk", an Oscar winning documentary that shows just how much Harvey meant to so many and how accurate Penn was with his Oscar winning portrayal.