THE cast of Gus Van Sant’s Milk are positively surgical in recreating persons and events associated with the first openly gay man elected to serious public office in the United States. How Sean Penn manifests government aspirations of his own into Harvey Milk’s politically strategic energies and at the same time loses all association of his patriarchal notions of masculinity is as inspiring as the movie itself. Van Sant charts the rise of the gay rights leader from hippy days and his battle against Proposition 6, a 1978 California state ballot initiative to outlaw homosexual teachers and school workers, to his demise at the hands of colleague Dan White’s revolver (Josh Brolin) in San Francisco City Hall later that year.
The team who back Milk tirelessly through defeat to electoral defeat, and his lover Scott Smith (James Franco), who concedes their relationship to Harvey’s political aspirations are recreated and rendered in impressive aesthetic accuracy. The only concern is that every lead role is occupied by straight – or at least not openly gay – players. But when homosexual actors Victor Garber and Denis O’Hare play the straight Mayor George Moscone (who was also assassinated) and the main exponent of Proposition 6, John Briggs, it seems less of an issue for politics than an exposition of the shallowness of movie-star culture. This is the normative and surface attitude that Milk fought tirelessly to address and considering how very few movie stars are openly gay and how large areas of the US (Arizona, California, Florida) still don’t condone same-sex marriage, his fight is still relevant and set to continue through others as a matter of necessity.
Van Sant packs everything you need to know about Harvey Milk and all he stood for into two hours. Even though the writing of relatively new scribe Dustin Lance Black is a little too eager to express even more by mining the possibilities of dialogue in each scene, the mixture of stock footage, old recordings, live action and newsreels augment the feeling of what it was like to be gay in San Francisco in the 1970s and captures the mood of a nation apathetic to change until change was forced on it by strong-willed individuals.
There is a certain charm surrounding Milk. However, when that charm filters the sometimes necessary nastiness of Harvey Milk and even the criminal insanity of sexually-repressed assassin Dan White – incredibly, he was deemed to have diminished responsibility due to bingeing on fast food – it leaves a sense of foreboding in exposing the perpetrators of the heinous as being – or having been – just like all the rest of us.
Andrew McWhiter
