“I think it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren’s eyes if they continue that way of support. We’ve got to have equal rights for everyone.” — Sean Penn, on the passing of Proposition 8
Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. It does not arrive silently nor is it met with acquiescence. It is a process of punctuation and repercussion. It is a fight. The man Harvey Milk understood this, and with a warm, genial temperament that palliated but never quenched the urgency of his agenda he assumed the fight for Gay Rights as his own, which it was. For the better part of a decade he galvanized the gay community in San Francisco, conducting its ragged antagonism into diplomatic reason. In 1977 the community’s buoyant outcries carried him to a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors as the first openly gay elected official in the United States. It was an achievement whose triumph is overshadowed by its necessity, a requisite step by a people toward the Declaration of Independence, but whose importance cannot be understated. The cost of the step gained, redeemed upon the assassination of Harvey Milk in 1978, was no mystery to the man himself. It was a sacrifice he marched toward knowingly. Fearful yet undissuaded by threats against his life, he never lost hope.
The idea for a film on Milk’s political career had been around for nearly two decades, probably since the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk took down the Academy Award in 1984. Over the years a number of directors and actors have been attached to various scripts, but it wasn’t until a recent flat race between Gus Van Sant and Bryan Singer, approaching the 30-year anniversary of Milk’s death, that the film finally went. Let us all be thankful that Van Sant’s project won out by a nose because his talent as a storyteller and an artist wins by eight or ten lengths, easily.
Throughout his career Van Sant has concerned himself with the unreality of the American dream, the discordance between the way things are and the way we are told they should be, and his films have focused on an intimate number of alienated outliers to the status quo. Homelessness, figurative and occasionally literal, has been his motif. His style, flowing and balletic, and his affinity for slow-motion sequences, having reached their poetic but absurd apex in his last film, Paranoid Park, are tempered in Milk for the sake of accessibility, as is his use of the hiccuping storyline. He maintains, however, an eye for grace in his direction and a belief in the power of an immobile or irregular shot to engage the viewers’ imagination more dynamically than leading them around by the nose. I was stunned by the simple, unusual beauty of a conversation between Milk and a San Francisco police officer after the beating of a gay man unfolding in the blood-flecked reflection of the victim’s discarded safety whistle. Touches like these for the unobserved make viewing Milk, or any Van Sant film, a process of discovery.
The great difficulty of realizing Milk, a biopic with a predetermined outcome, was making the film more than a procession toward the grave, allowing the vitality of a man and a movement to shine in the shadow of impending tragedy. Much of the film’s ability to do so can be attributed to its high degree of intimacy. The nakedness of the performances coupled with the bare gaze of the camera reveal an irrepressible hope. Even though we are confronted with Milk’s assassination almost immediately, the body bag being dollied away in a blip of archival news footage during the first minutes of the film, the following scene, which introduces the character Milk, is so arresting in its portrayal of the man’s vulnerability and optimism that we cannot help but be carried off by it. The fatalism that ultimately tugs at the story’s coattail is dissolved by the truth in that moment. It is held at a distance by hope, and by the magnetic and impossibly compassionate performance Milk‘s star, Sean Penn. In my mind, the Academy Award was his by the conclusion of his first scene on the subway stairwell. Penn creates a man transparent of ill will yet charismatic and of tenacious purpose, and over the course of the film he reasserts himself as an actor of the highest caliber, belonging to the fraternity of Daniel Day-Lewis and Philip Seymour Hoffman as one of the greatest working actors today.
The timing of Milk‘s theatrical release, little more than a week before the November election that saw Proposition 8 strip same-sex couples in California of the right to marry, was no coincidence. It was film as political activism, and it showed that some people still believe in the power of art to affect, and not simply comment on, the world in which it is created. That the film failed to sway public opinion is regrettable and underscores both a continued strain of human ignorance and the impotent role of art in the modern world. Milk‘s release to DVD, however, coming little less than a week after the California Supreme Court began hearing arguments for a repeal on Proposition 8, represents a chance for one or both of those things to change. It is a chance for a film, a movement, the memory of a man, to push back with their collective will against repression and regain the step that was lost, a chance for hope. Without it, Harvey Milk rightfully said, life is not worth living. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]
Biography/Drama
Rated R
DVD Release Date: 3/10/09