Milk (2008, USA)

A very moving film, Gus Van Sant’s Milk feels like a personal project for all involved. A biopic that occasionally masquerades in documentary form (using both stock footage and filming scenes as if they were stock footage), it’s the rare sort of film that tells not only the story of a man, but the story of his a movement as well. Ignoring Harvey Milk’s beginnings, Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black introduce us to Milk at forty, only a few years before he begins his tragically short career as a political activist in San Francisco. What we see of Milk is his transformation from semi-closeted businessman to openly gay city official, the community that forms around him, and the wreck he makes of his personal life as he lives more and more in the public eye.

Much has already been written about Sean Penn’s amazing transformation into Harvey Milk, but I’ve got to admit – it’s all true. There are points when you can completely forget that it’s Penn you’re watching; he embodies the character so completely. Surrounding him are strong performances by James Franco as Milk’s long-suffering boyfriend, Scott Smith, and Emile Hirsch as newly-hatched activist Cleve Jones. (Hirsch is particularly good, though he so strongly resembles Jo Lo Truglio in Wet Hot American Summer that I couldn’t help but giggle at first.) Josh Brolin serves well as Dan White, though it’s nearly an impossible role, particularly with all of the film’s implications that White was a closeted homosexual himself, and Diego Luna flails a bit as Milk’s boy-toy, Jack Lira. No matter – it’s really Penn’s show here, and no one crowds around enough to detract attention.

The real question that I always have to ask myself about a biopic – is it a hagiography? Do Black and Van Sant show Milk as a man or a legend? I think that with Penn’s help, they largely achieve the former – there are moments when Milk’s fervor for the movement seems self-serving (he does seem to love to be in the public eye) and overzealous (calling for ALL gay men and women to come out, regardless of personal safety or feelings). Then there’s the question of his love of younger, often unstable, men, something that Milk never fully develops as a theme, but that it tends to use more as a symbol of Milk’s sense of mortality, which I think is cheating a little bit.

Biopics are tricky, but Milk largely succeeds where many stumble. It may play with the borders of its subject’s life, and there are a few moments that feel cheap but manage to move all the same (has Van Sant been taking lessons from Spielberg?), but I think it gives us a picture of a man who, thirty years after his death, continues to serve as a hero to many. As I was leaving the theater, I overheard a man asking his friend, “Is your nose running?” – receiving the reply, “I’ve been crying for two hours!” That’s the kind of film Milk is – unabashedly emotional, and sometimes highly-strung, but with a real heart and a mission, too. Perhaps not so different from the man himself.