Milk

This old crank set a new record low for number of visits to a movie theater in one calendar year: I saw exactly 6 movies outside of the house in 2008. That is by far the lowest number ever. Back in the 70's and 80's, I averaged a movie a week and sometimes more; one year back in my college days, I saw over 80 movies in one year. But home video, less well mannered audiences, a big screen TV, and a general disenchantment with Hollywood has led me do most of my movieviewing 1) at home, and 2) of classic-era movies rather than recent ones. I still keep up on some current films, but generally through Netflix, cable TV, or the library.

But I had a good experience on New Years' Day by going out "among 'em," as my mom would say, and seeing Milk. Friends and colleagues who rarely ask me about recent films were asking me, Have you seen Milk yet? I soon realized it was my gay civic duty to see it, so I went not necessarily expecting a lot: I'm not a fan of Sean Penn (the star) or Gus van Sant (the director). But it's a excellent film and Penn gives the best performance by a leading actor that I've seen in years. He fully inhabits the role of Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay people to be elected to public office, on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, back in 1978 at a time when Anita Bryant was traveling the country, helping get anti-gay legislation passed in a number of states.

The film starts in 1970 when Milk was living a buttoned-down life in New York City, and follows him through the decade when he begins leading a more free-wheeling existence in San Francisco, just as the Castro neighborhood was taking off as a gay mecca. Milk worked hard to become a respected merchant and soon became a politician, trying to represent not just his gay constituents, but minorities and the working class as well. It takes him a few years, but he is eventually elected a City Supervisor; after being in office for a year, he was assassinated, along with the mayor of San Francisco, by Dan White, a disgruntled (that's the adjective that virtually every print source about this guy uses) Supervisor who was certainly homophobic, possibly a latent homosexual, and who claimed that his acts were caused by too many Twinkies in his diet.


Penn is a wonder, resisting the temptation to exaggerate mannerisms or play it campy; after the first few minutes, he totally disappears in the role. Josh Brolin is almost as good as White; he doesn't have as much to work with, as White was and remains a cipher, at least to the public, but he does a lot with his eyes: sometimes angry, sometimes dead, always chilling. The rest of the cast is good, though only James Franco (above) as Milk's long-time partner, who left Milk when the political animal in him took over, gets much substantive screen time. I also liked Alison Pill as Milk's campaign manager, Victor Garber as Mayor George Moscone, and Joseph Cross as a friend of Milk's, who gets one of the few laughs in the film during a brief sexual escapade. I got quite teary at the end in a scene that plays out like the finale of Field of Dreams (which always gets my waterworks going). The film does a nice job mixing in occasional bits of real-life footage, though we don't see the real Harvey Milk until the credits sequence starts. Highly recommended; I haven't seen many of the Oscar-bait films yet, but I hope at the very least that Penn wins Best Actor for this.