FILM REVIEW: Milk
Article published: Tuesday, February 24th 2009
Depending on your politics, Gus Van Sants Milk, a biopic of the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States, is either the documentation of a man slowly becoming more and more boring, or an inspirational account of a man whose message is only accentuated by his brutal assassination.
The Academy Award nominated flick begins with a closeted Harvey Milk, courtesy of another expert Sean Penn performance, picking up another, uncloseted man in a New York subway; and so begins a long term monogamous relationship that finds Milk and Scott Smith (convincingly played by James Franco) resettled as out-and-out hippies in San Francisco. As the gay community builds, so does the backlash; with the backlash grows the gay resistance movement. At the centre is Milk, now a community organiser who decides to do away with the pot and the beard and return to the closeted look in order to win political power.
Eventually he is elected as City Supervisor. This is presented, unequivocally, as a good thing. The election shtick Harvey Milk versus the machine is designed to make Milks outsider status in the Democratic party into an asset; whether it is sincere or not is only questioned in one line, in which an activist, now an insider in City Hall, asks if Milk is the machine.
There is one scene in which Milk manipulates his community into a near-riot, which he then stops by giving a speech on the steps of City Hall in order to win the press label of "mediator". This suggests Milk is part of the machine. But then we have to wonder if its fair to criticise his selling out, considering that the same machine sought to prevent homosexuals or those that support them from working in public jobs such as teaching. Is joining the machine the only way to throw a cog in it?
The basic fault of the film is that it exposes these questions seemingly by accident and then fails to address them. A more radical film would have placed more inquiry into Milk as a person, particularly in light of his poor judgement in the selection of his deranged second partner, Jack Lira, for whom Milk has a lot of inexplicable patience.
Instead, it becomes a sort of petty foreshadowing of his eventual martyrdom rather than an investigation of a complicated, evidently occasionally stupid, human being. Similarly there is no more than a cursory treatment of the police, who were overtly enthusiastic in their repression of the gay community and from whose ranks emerged Dan White (played with a brooding subtlety by Josh Brolin), the fellow Supervisor who shot Milk. ÂÂÂ
The Bay Area hardcore band’s cover of The Dead Kennedys I Fought the Law tells the assassination from Whites point of view, ending with the line I am the law, and I won. White served only a few years of on a manslaughter charge after his defence successfully argued that he was depressed during the murders, an imbalance contributed to by his consumption of junk food the night before. Whites actual motives are unclear; Van Sant seems to suggest that he is battling with his own repressed homosexuality. This explanation seems a little dull and effortless at least; ultimately, and to its detriment, nothing detracts from Milk as the focus.
Does this make it a bad film? Not at all, but its sincerity rules it out for Oscar bait. The story of Harvey Milk is a inspiring one but we are given a canonisation rather than an exploration of the man. A more satisfying depiction would have shown a flawed, well-intentioned political manipulator, battling against entrenched institutional homophobia instead of a liberal saint possessing of a transcendent goodness. A good film and a stylish film, but ultimately, rather simple.
Mule went to the cinema at The Cornerhouse in Manchester. For more film listings and information on other events and exhibitions, go to www.cornerhouse.org or call 0161 228 7671
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