Last night, I gave myself a special birthday treat and stumped up nearly £15 to see Milk, Gus Van Sant’s biopic about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to hold public office in the USA. It’s exactly the sort of film that I like to see alone, allowing time to think about it on my own terms afterwards. So allow me to put on my amateur cinema critic hat and spill out a few thoughts onto the screen.
Enjoyable as it is, largely due to Sean Penn, and more bearable than most gay-themed films, Milk is poorly fleshed out. It’s even flat in its portrayal of events, and of a passionate man who felt the effects of militant and quiet repression first hand, and its effects on a social and personal level.
There’s no fire in Milk, who is portrayed with too little passion, instead being shown from beginning to end as a calming influence and often a clever opportunist, though the film misses out on an opportunity to highlight this at its most grand by squeezing in Milk’s outing of a man who stopped a Presidential assassination. Of all the script crams in, it’s disappointing that this falls by the wayside.
However, the film doesn’t fail to explain the political activisim that Milk embraced throughout his 40s, but it’s most successful in demonstrating this on a social level in surprisingly non-graphic reconstructions of police brutality and the intimidation faced by gays in 1970s San Francisco and interspersing it with archive footage. But the edit packs in mere seconds of real emotion from Penn for a couple of key events in Milk’s personal life. The rest of the time, he’s portrayed with the resolve of a military leader who can’t show a glint of emotion for fear of how it would impact on his officers’ morale.
Josh Brolin does well in part of Milk’s colleague on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Dan White, painting him as a man slowly going off the rails for whatever reason—on which Milk speculates early in the film—but for someone so critical to the story, Brolin is the most woefully underused and unexplained person in the whole film. You never really get a feeling of what’s going on in his life, and the film merely skims the surface of his impeccably preened hair.
Close contributors to Milk’s campaigns for election also barely get a look in, though, in truth, there are too many of them to spare each more than a little screen time. Most disapppointing among them, though, is the time devoted to his campaign manager at the time of his eventual election, Anne Kronenberg, mostly squeezed into the frame for her introduction to a slew of predictable lesbian jokes. Her role is topped off with an endearing moment when Milk ignores the pessimism of his long-standing supporters and goes with her advice on how to attract more votes. It’s a heart-warming moment that reveals a close respect between the two people, but the relationship is quickly shoved to the background.
Scott Smith, Milk’s partner throughout much of his political life, is played well by James Franco, whose chemistry with Penn is convincing enough but, save their meeting and a couple of key moments, it feels like much of the progression of their relationship hit the cutting room floor. Milk is a pleasant enough experience but too run of the mill to be properly effective. Of course, that quality could help it garner recognition in the upcoming awards season.
The end result is the portrayal of a gay Princess Diana, retrospectively viewed as a saint and revealing too few human moments to bring better understanding from his personal life to his own actions. So while time is set aside for Penn to distinguish gay rights as being about people’s lives, rather than the more trivial issues faced by the Board of Supervisors such as dog faeces in the streets. This rubs off as the eventual letdown of the film, which comes across as just a touch too preachy in its repressive, holier-than-thou aura that leaves little room for the central role to live and breathe.
Milk remains watchable thanks to excellent performances, but the material’s presentation lacks depth. Ultimately, Milk will only tide us over until the next big gay rights film, which is an injustice to the importance of the man’s contribution and sacrifices.
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Did you feel compelled to see this film because of the massive publicity it was getting in San Francisco when we where there? :¬)
Interesting review; I haven’t seen it yet – was going to go this weekend, but my plans had to change, and I’m currently up in Scotland – but even just from the trailers, I was very impressed by Sean Penn. I have enormous respect for Gary Oldman, and that’s largely because he genuinely seems to be a different person in each film he does; if we had the ability to change actors’ faces completely, I think you’d be hard pushed to recognise him in some of his roles.
I never had Penn down for this kind of quality, however, but even just from the trailer it looks like he has been able to change his acting style radically – and I begin to forget it’s ‘Sean Penn’. Looking forward to seeing the film soon.
I knew of Milk before I went to San Francisco, and I even tried to see it there. Unfortunately my dinner partner persuaded me to see the execrable Bride Wars instead, so I’m grateful that Milk has been released so closely in the UK and North America.
Despite my misgivings about the film’s structure and depth, it’s still worth seeing, provided the tickets are a lot cheaper than I paid. Don’t wait for the DVD release, though, as even the grainy archival footage is worth seeing on the big screen.