Milk: a tale of emancipation

Rating: Null/10 (12 February 2009)

Gay community owes a great deal to Harvey Milk as much as black community does to Malcom X. By the same token, Milk is as indebted to Sean Penn as Malcom X is to Denzel Washington. These two underdog communities suddenly had a chance to say their piece in the American melting pot owing to the messianic larger than life Ms. Milk comes to the screens amid deafening razzmatazz about Proposition 8, banning any gay marriage in San Francisco, to its credit. The timing could never be any better. The message is that nothing is far from over yet as long as human rights, gay rights as one of its basic components, are concerned. What Harvey Milk surmounted was just the tip of the ice-berg and the rest has yet to be conquered by his feisty supporters. It is down to them to keep the queer flames ablaze kindled by their trailblazer.
Sean Penn has yet to enjoy a wheelbarrowful of critical plaudits bestowed ungrudgingly for his polished and sparkling performance and his daring portrayal of Harvey milk. Sean Penn is a Goliath of an actor with a prodigious talent for effortlessly disappearing into his characters. As Harvey, he is disarming, bristling with verve and vitality, humorous, witty, eloquent, touching and phenomenal. His refrain "My name is Harvey Milk. I want to recruit you" will linger like background music in ears for long. His performance sure as hell is Oscar-worthy.
Gus van Sant makes a movie, from an original script by Dustin Lance Black, which does not primarily intend to show history or put Harvey on a campy pedestal. He portrays and celebrates humanity in the form of a gay hero with all his flaws and virtues. His paying rapt attention to the details and nuances in his characters is sterling and exemplary. To him, plot on the whole is not such a big deal since in the first minutes of the film everything is told from beginning to the end before movie flashes back to the days when Milk was forty and not uncloseted yet. It is all the minutiae about the characters that really count.
Milk is the first openly gay public official in the U.S. as San Francisco supervisor. His relocation from New York to San Francisco to find a gay haven along with his newly found partner, Scott Smith (the magnificent James Franco), marks a watershed in gay history as it is a shift from the closet into the open. The bullhorn wielding Milk whips up support by getting on his soapbox and magnetizes disciples like Cleve Jones (the convincing Emile Hirsche, his protégé in "into the wild"). After three unsuccessful attempts, he finally gets elected as a city supervisor. Then the mentally imbalanced fellow supervisor, Dan White (the persuasive Josh Brolin who also comes to the screens with George W. Bush's character in Oliver Stones' "W"), sprays him and the mayor, George Moscone (Victor Garber's character) with bullets.
To his credit, Mr. Van Sant's biopic is far from being an elegy but a celebration and reminder of how some now somehow taken-for-granted human rights ever came to existence. His attempt is no mean feat.
The idea of making a biopic about Harvey Milk has been on the back burner for more than a decade with directors like Oliver Stone and Bryan Singer expressing interest. Now with the present outcome, moviegoers come to think it has been worth the anticipation.