This is not a gay movie; this is civil rights

Rating: 8/10 (31 December 2008)

White. Milk. There are no accidents in life, right? While "Milk" stops short of outing Dan White(Josh Brolin) outright, talking to his queer "cabinet" in a straight building, newly elected representative Harvey Milk(Sean Penn) has a hunch that the senior career politician might be one of them. The filmmaker suggests this possibility, visually, with great subtlety, later on, in a scene where the career politician occupies a couch, seemingly isolated, seemingly marooned in his own house like he was on a desert island. A married man, a father, even, the straight man sits grimly, perhaps in bewilderment over his own unhappiness. The only time we see Dan with his wife, they're at church, for their baby's baptismal, with Harvey in attendance. This is how heterosexuality works; this is the gist that City Supervisor White wishes to convey, no doubt. There's great irony in this social call, since Harvey often uses this opening line, with tongue firmly placed in cheek, at public speaking engagements to incite post-laughter from his minions: "I'm Harvey Milk, and I'm here to recruit you." It's always good to warm up the crowd with a joke. He knows you choose to be Catholic; you don't choose to be straight, or gay.
After a failed bid for the city supervisor seat, Harvey starts to dress for success; a suit and tie, which he appropriates as a means for infiltration beyond his base. The filmmaker is willing to play chameleon just like the titular character; he tosses away his non-conformist clothing too, putting on the same suit and tie himself, so to speak, for the first time since "Finding Forrester". Gone are the Bela Tarr affectations; the spectacle of Milk kissing his lover(James Franco) needs to be normalized by a film language that everybody can readily process. Avant-garde storytelling techniques would only serve to further alienate an audience unaccustomed to an honest depiction of same-sex affection. Politics is too prosaic for poetry, anyway. Since "Milk" focuses more on Harvey Milk the politician/activist than the man, applying the abstruse approach of "Elephant", "Last Days", and "Paranoid Park, those baroque temples dedicated to high art, which wowed film festival crowds, but proved to be too enigmatic for the masses, would needlessly obscure Milk's politics, and the film's. The docudrama, a docudrama told in chronological order; that was a savvy move on the filmmaker's part, and the right choice, both for marketing and aesthetic reasons. Knowing the fate that awaits this slain politician, "Milk" has no time to waste. In place of long takes and ambiguous, character-driven motivations, the film is long on clarity, instead.
The film portrays milk as a master of compartmentalization. For Scott, going mainstream would have just been a simple matter of shaving off his gay porn mustache. His replacement, Milk's rebound(Diego Luna), is so ill-suited for Milk, so apolitical, he's scandalous even by gay community standards. Through his masquerade of a "respectable" civic servant, Milk's affair with this "mim-bo" demonstrates how all politicians are alike, straight or gay. Jack could be Donna Rice, or worse, one of J.F.K.'s whores that the president's secret servicemen allegedly shuttled in and out of the White House under Jackie O.'s eye. The filmmaker paints Milk in whites that aren't the whites of angels. When a friend asks the politician about his beau, he dismisses him as some plaything, a lover in whose company one need not exhaust their mental faculties around. Milk was using Jack for sex, as he waited for somebody better to come along; in particular, waiting for Scott to come back into his fold. Not only does Harvey Milk have the same ability to coalesce people into a movement as Dr. Martin Luther King did; he has the same peccadilloes. With the gay activist, however, pinpointing the peccadillo depends entirely on the viewer. Is the venal sin: meaningless sex, or the sex itself?
People hurt people for being different. The filmmaker suggests the violence that gay people face, rather than being explicit about it. There's no long, drawn-out scene that which leads the person to a coroner's visit. There's just the body, and the sheet that goes over it. "Milk" never tries to milk sympathy out of the viewer. Maybe the film needs a little more anger. When Penn shouts, "I know you're angry! I am angry!!" he's referring to a proposition that revokes gay people's rights for civil liberties. "Milk" should make more explicit that Harvey's anger is directed towards the slurs, the senseless violence, the entire breadth of debasement.