A Casual Movie Night for Heterosexuals

Rating: 7/10 (23 January 2017)

In Dustin Lance Black's film, Milk, a story is told of the "heroic" and hardworking Harvey Milk. Milk was born in 1930 in New York and moved to San Francisco in 1972. In the film, it is set starting in the early 1970s going until Harvey's murder of 1978. Although this seems like a spoiler, the film introduces both Harvey and Mayor George Moscone's death within the first five minutes. The primary actors in the film include Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Emile Hirsch, and James Franco, who all except Josh Brolin portray gay men. The film starts with playing many different original clips from 1978 when Harvey Milk's death was announced and the White Night Riots begun. This is seemingly interesting because the film does not show or go into the actual White Night Riots as well as the film ends quite quickly after Harvey's death. The storyline goes that Milk and his lover, Scott Smith, move into a cute apartment on Castro Street. They open up Castro's Cameras and that begins to create a LGBTQ community based in the Castro district. Once this starts to build up, Milk seems more like a leader of this district and this spurs up the idea of him being more of a political leader. He runs three times before finally being elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1977 as the lead candidate to the city council. He becomes the first openly gay man to be elected into a political position and stands by his hardships as he works to focus on and fix the outside views of gay rights to lead to more equality. Milk passes the "Pooper Scooper" law, still active to this day, as well as oppose the Proposition 6 which was powerful because the initiative granted the government the right to fire anyone who was gay or supported gay people from their jobs in public schools. Though Milk only served 11 months before being murdered, the film depicts his story as interesting, fierce, and challenging. Although well put together, a major issue with the entire films portrayal on Milk is his monogamous behavior. Although in the film Harvey simply has his long-term partner Scott Smith, and a shorter-termed relationship with Jack Lira, Milk's real life was nothing like this. Documents say that Milk went out often and slept around quite a bit. The issue with this is the sugar coating of the film so that it is better fit for straight audiences who are not comfortable with homosexual acts. The film does not properly show who Milk truly is and this leaves a romanticized left-over of his life, which is not accurate and may confuse viewers into looking at Harvey differently. Another large issue in the film was that Milk seemed to be the complete, one-and-only hero of the homosexual gay rights movement. He is portrayed not as a measly supervisor to the mayor, but as someone comparable to a state senator or someone even higher up. Although Harvey Milk did justice and worked very hard on the gay rights movement, he was not the sole face to the movement that helped defend against Proposition 6. Although a film about Milk makes some sense to emphasize his importance, it dramatizes his contributions to the movement while downplaying the organizations that had laid down a foundation from about a decade before. Overall, the movie was spectacular, interesting, and moderately insightful to this era and Milk's life. It contains some inaccuracies, but they're made to soften the realities of that time for the audience trying to be reached. This film came out in 2008 at a good time for the gay rights conversation to be continued and explored through the past. At some points the film seems to be a movie, and at others it seems to be a documentary because of it's old footage and seemingly accurate details. Milk makes itself to be a good movie for heterosexuals looking for a somewhat thought provoking, interesting Friday night film, but does not entice many LGBTQ viewers as it doesn't portray everything how it actually is.