CityLife

Milk

GUS Van Sant’s heartfelt but slightly disappointing film is based on the life and times of gay activist Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be voted into major public office in America.

The fact that he was assassinated not long after has turned him, not unjustifiably, into a gay icon but he was also important as a fighter for the rights of all sorts of ill-served minorities, from senior citizens to uninon workers.

So he represents a very significant figure in the human rights struggle in America.

Unfortunately, the high esteem in which Milk is held seems to have induced in film-maker Gus Van Sant an unusually polite, reverent and linear approach to the material.

This does it no favours at all and the film singularly lacks the sort of fire and passion which made the Oscar-winning 1984 documentary, The Times Of Harvey Milk, such an inspiring film.

That said, Gus Van Sant’s film does boast yet another extraordinary performance from Sean Penn, surely one of the finest actors of his generation.

As played by Penn, Harvey Milk is a winningly ordinary, flawed guy, who was passionate about the things he needed to be inflamed by but also pragmatic to the point of being untrustworthy.

The film, written by Dustin Lance Black – who penned the script at the same time as he was writing the TV series Big Love – the film begins with Milk at 48, reflecting into his tape recorder about a personal journey that began just eight yeears earlier.

Still in the closet in New York, a Republican in a stiff suit, Milk was an improbable activist at the time. But a chance meeting on the subway with the love of his life Scott Smith (James Franco) pushed him into really wanting to do something with his life.

His involvement with a hippy theatre company in Greenwich Village began to edge the closet door ajar and it was kicked entirely open after he and Smith moved to the gay enclave of the Castro district in San Francisco, opening a camera shop there only to discover there that even America’s largest and most vocal gay community was being systematically persecuted by homophobic police.

Pushed into politics, he discovered a talent for public speaking that involved a certain element of showbiz, habitually orating while standing on a box labeled “Soap”.

Castro Street

He became known as the Mayor of Castro Street, and ran for the Board of Supervisors three times before being elected in 1977.

Campaigning for a gay rights ordinance and vigorously opposing homophobic national figures like Anita Bryant, he forged an alliance including liberals, unions, teachers, Latinos, blacks and the neglected elderly of his community. 

But Milk was no knight in shining armour and his personal life, after splitting from Smith, who could no longer handle his political ambitiousness, was something of a disaster.

Although Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch) became another community organiser, Milk’s lover Jack Lira (Diego Luna) was a Mexican American who became neurotically jealous of Milk, even though Milk remained almost compulsively supportive.

His most fateful relationship, though, was with Dan White (Josh Brolin), a seemingly straight member of the Board of Supervisors, a Catholic who said homosexuality was a sin and paraded his wife and children for political gain.

Nonetheless, an awkward alliance formed between Milk and White, who, the film implies, was probably gay. He was also an alcoholic and, increasingly, clearly unbalanced.

Eventually, White resigned his position, then calmly walked into City Hall and assassinated Milk, along with Mayor George Moscone.

This is clearly an important, poignant story and one of the film’s most effective scenes comes near the end, showing a candlelight march reaching as far as the eyes can see as the citizens of San Francisco expressed their sorrow and outrage at what had happened to a brave man.

This, though, is actual documentary footage and it’s nearly undercut by such glib Hollywood-isms as having Milk dying within sight of the opera he’d – of course – seen the night before his death.

Perhaps my disappointment with Milk is simply based on unfairly high expectations. But it is certainly worth seeing, even if only for Penn’s performance and for familiarising a new generation, perhaps high on Obama, with relatively recent American history.

What did you think? Have your say.

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