Milk is quickly gaining accolades for Sean Penn’s performance as gay rights hero Harvey Milk, but the additional heralding of the film’s politics points to one of the greater joys of the movie – it’s exciting. While the film marks a return to a more commercial sensibility for director Gus Van Sant, it largely avoids the usual pragmatic and polemic pitfalls that mar historical films, instead finding beauty and poetry in the biography of a martyred hero.
The film follows Milk, America’s first openly gay person elected to government, from his arrival in San Francisco to his brief time as a city supervisor and his assassination at the hands of fellow supervisor Dan White (Josh Brolin). Milk arrived in SF’s famous gay Castro district with his lover Scott Smith (James Franco) in the early 1970s. The two opened a camera shop and dove into a slacker lifestyle, but Milk found his attention drawn to activism and the fight for gay rights. He quickly entered the political game, and though he lost two elections, with the aid of a skilled group of advisors and activists, including artist and activist Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch), he won his third.
Penn does a fine job carrying the film, portraying Milk as a joyful, eloquent and pragmatic man. His performance stands in stark contrast to Brolin’s alternately great and frustrating take on White, who one moment seems the usual conservative family man and, the next, a podunk idiot lost in a political world that utterly baffles him.
Early on in the film, Van Sant teases viewers with brief moments of gay male sexuality, quickly abandoned when the film gets political. While seeing the political machinations of Milk’s career at work is fascinating, the sexuality feels like a theme that shouldn’t have been so easily forgotten: Milk is very much a vision of a male “gaytopia,” yet curiously free of actual sex — perhaps the filmmakers were worried that viewers coming to see a Sean Penn vehicle couldn’t handle it. (A few people did leave the preview screening in Calgary — perhaps the innocuous kissing and off-camera blow jobs were a little too much for them.)
It’s hard to discuss the film without mentioning the spectre of California’s recent Proposition 8, and watching Milk’s struggles adds a welcome sense of urgency. Milk is an important film — exciting, frustrating and a call to arms. Harvey would be proud.
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