Milk Review

My mad dash to see all of this year’s Best Picture nominees before the Oscars this Sunday continued on Valentine’s Day when I just happened to find myself five minutes away from one about three theatres in the Tampa area still showing “Milk” and the movie starting in five minutes.

(This is the part of the blog where I pause to thank my wonderful girlfriend Erica for not just being eternally tolerant of my movie geekdom, but for actually genuinely enjoying herself after being taken to see “Milk” on Valentine’s Day, which is a great film, but not exactly a romantic epic.)

“Milk” tells the true life story of Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), the former San Francisco city supervisor and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. The film follows Harvey’s various campaigns in the 1970’s and the enormous influence he had on his neighborhood of Castro Street, his city and, eventually, the state. The movie also takes a little bit of time to show the toll his political ambitions and activism had on Milk’s personal life in the form of his relationships with Scott Smith (James Franco) and the more unstable Jack Lira (Diego Luna).

What this movie does incredibly well (through a combination of great skill and luck) is something “Frost/Nixon” also accomplished: it’s made subject matter that appears to be very specific to a certain period of American history and made it super-relevant to today’s audiences.

And I’m not just talking about the overt homosexual themes.

Sure, there’s an obvious line to be drawn between Milk and his team’s battle against Proposition 6 — which would prohibit gays or suspected homosexuals from teaching at California public schools — led by jeer-worthy State Senator John Briggs (Denis O’Hare) and the recent passage of Proposition 8 in California, which eliminated same-sex couples’ right to marry. However, the movie does a wonderful job of not just being about gay-themes, while not ever feeling like its shying away from its same-sex subject matter.

In my opinion, the movie is just as relevant for the way it showed that with years of hard work, an indomitable spirit in the face of repeated failures and an honest belief in the power of change, almost anything’s possible.

All of that being said, director Gus Van Sant (who’s been trying to get this movie made for 15 years), screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (a relative newbie who finally made the necessary breakthrough with the script) and Sean Penn don’t make the guy out to be a saint.

Sean Penn does some of the best work in his stellar career as Milk, capturing (what I imagine to be) the man’s fierce charisma. Penn is equally effective in the scenes where he’s addressing thousands of people in a crowd as he is when he’s “recruiting” people to his cause one-on-one, like his initial scene with street hustler Cleve Jones (a terrific Emile Hirsch).

However, once he is elected city supervisor, he finds an interesting frenemy in fellow supervisor Dan White (an incredibly Josh Brolin). White seems to be the polar opposite of Milk, but also appears to have more in common with and admire Milk more than he would care to admit. And Brolin delivers a creepy, unsettling and, ultimately, sad performance. In case you don’t think he can also bring the funny, Brolin also does the best job of playing drunk I’ve seen in a long time during a scene at Milk’s birthday party.

Penn’s Milk is also caring toward his damaged lovers, but there just don’t appear to be enough hours in the day to make his relationships with Scott (Franco does alluring, but annoyed dependability well) or Jack (Luna is a great, unpredictable little fiend) work. Both of those characters may have been a smidge underdeveloped, but Franco and Luna helped make Scott and Jack, respectively, come alive. Also, with the movie clocking in at just a little over two hours, I’ll gladly sacrifice a little character development for secondary characters, in the interest of keeping the film moving along.

Sure, you can accuse Van Sant and Black of skimming through certain periods in time, not presenting a balanced perspective and not really delving too deeply into who Harvey Milk or his associates really were.

Still, the director stages the movie with such great style and energy while doing a really good job of incorporating real-life footage, and Black makes the wise decision of focusing on Harvey and his team’s immense efforts and the way they inspired people, that it doesn’t really matter who these people were. All that matters is that they were strong and persistent enough to fight for what they believed in at the time.

At the risk of sounding like a pretentious movie critic on a poster, I’d say that “Milk” is one of the most “important” and “moving” films of the year. While it may bear its lead character’s name, “Milk” is really about anyone who’s ever stopped doing nothing and stood up against something they believed to be wrong.

Milk...A