film, eyeballs, brain

I give up. As an audience viewer who happens to live in the state of California, where the campaign against Proposition 8 went down in shocking, stinging defeat, it’s too difficult for me to evaluate Milk without all the extra-cinematic circumstances getting in the way. My friend Carolyn told me to bring Kleenex, but, the unsentimental coot that I am, I was shedding no tears; what I didn’t expect was to be sitting there as the credits rolled with my fists actually clenched in frustration. I’ve been gently reminded by friends, to calm me down, that some of the people who supported Prop 8 and refused to recognize gay marriage were also people who voted Obama into office, and that they should be treated with respect; on the other hand, I was reminded by another friend that asking him to respect those Prop 8 supporters was like asking him to respect those people who wanted coloreds out of the swimming pool. Milk bristles with, for once, a welcome didactic fury, and director Gus Van Sant rightly frames the movie squarely in terms of civil rights – and not just a general nod to the idea of human rights, but one specifically about gay rights. It’s hard to watch it and not be furious at the intolerant Anita Bryants and the James Dobsons of this world; it’s difficult not to come out of the theater and feel some sadness about the possibility that the movie’s release – timed, I’m guessing, for the 30th-year anniversary of Harvey Milk’s and George Moscone’s assassination – could have maybe changed some hearts and minds had it come out earlier. (And had the campaign against Prop 8 been run better, but that’s another story.) Milk is a moving, courageous, and important movie; let yourself be recruited, and tell everyone you know about it.

And now, back to the film qua film: Milk is far, far more levelheaded than I am in the indignant paragraph above. It’s a great film about the gay rights movement; it’s also a great movie about San Francisco. (It also happens to be a great movie about community organizing as well, and I wished there were more of those scenes.) What it isn’t, however, is a great Gus Van Sant film.

But I think I raise my expectations too much by pronouncing it a great movie about San Francisco. It is, actually, as the audience gets an in-depth sense of the city with its district-level divisions, and the politicking and dealing involved within the board of supervisors. A testament to Van Sant’s efficient filmmaking, Milk features practically seamless transitions between re-creation and actual television news clips.

But let me raise a small quibble here: Van Sant’s re-creation of San Francisco in the ‘70s is apparently fairly historically accurate, at least visually – the sideburns and flared pants are all there, and Emile Hirsch’s large glasses are so unflattering they must be real – but such careful mimicry lends the movie open to other more sociological questions.

For instance, it’s unclear from the film why San Francisco became such a mecca for gays in the first place. One figures it must have been utterly thrilling and liberating to be young and gay in the Castro in the ’70s, and yet there isn’t (for instance) a single leather bar or disco or bathhouse in sight. It would still be a few years before AIDS would ravage the community – and granted, the film opens just after the fatal hate crime perpetrated on Robert Hillsborough in 1978 – but in Milk it feels like these perfectly respectable partygoers are already at a wake. Even the stirring speech scenes – particularly one at City Hall after the defeat of anti-gay laws across the country – should feel airy and triumphant, but instead they’re overburdened with dark portent. It may certainly have been the company Milk kept (and this is dramatized in the film itself, after he decides to buy a suit and get a haircut), but there’s no sense of – no pun intended, honestly – gay abandon.

I suspect this absence has to do with the seriousness I mention in my first paragraph above – as if Van Sant had to choose between a sense of play and Oscar poker-faced importance, and the latter won out. (The opening credits foreground this anyhow, as it shows black-and-white newsreels of gay men being arrested in bars by the police.) All this is wrapped in a fairly conventional shell of a movie – a film by the director of the lackluster Good Will Hunting (1997), and not, unfortunately, the director of the “Portland Trilogy” (Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, and My Own Private Idaho, which he made between 1985 and 1991). (Though I think I prefer the brilliant Gerry / Elephant / Last Days “trilogy” from the early 2000s myself.)

Sean Penn, as always, fully inhabits his character. (Perhaps the real revelation here is James Franco, who we see puffing on a joint early in Milk and inadvertently reminding the audience of his last big success, Pineapple Express, where he was in David Gordon Green’s good hands directorially, but not script-wise. It’s easy to forget, though, that one of Penn’s most memorable roles was that of a stoner, too.) Penn may not always be the most subtle of actors, and I can imagine that a docudrama would tempt a lesser performer to overact the starring role. But his performance here is a quietly forceful one, in keeping with the tenor of the film.

Milk isn’t a character study, in an odd sense. We don’t gain any insight into what made the man tick; we understand his clearly articulated political position, and the principle behind his convictions, but the film doesn’t illuminate the reasons why this seemingly ordinary camera-shop owner became who he was, and why he refused to quit. In the end, the film is not really about Milk; it’s about the forces of change slowly growing around him, and after him, and because of him. Milk is a film about the movement, and one thinks that Milk would probably have wanted it that way.

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