Every once in a while, a movie comes along that just gets everything right. In fact, it gets so many things right that you remember not only what's so great about movies, but why you wanted to make them in the first place.
Gus Van Sant's
Milk is one of those movies.
I don't know if I can even list all the things I loved and found powerful about this movie, but I will try. For details of the plot, just go see the movie. It's out (and proud :-)) in New York and LA, and will be opening in the rest of the country this weekend. If you haven't seen it--go see it.
On a purely artistic level, this film is an amazing achievement. Sean Penn (who, incidentally, is 48, the same age as Milk when he was assassinated) is simply phenomenal. He has utterly transformed himself. He has not only somehow found a way to make his nose and forehead bigger, but has captured the slightly awkward, slightly effeminate mannerisms, the way of speaking and even the way of smiling of someone else entirely. His chemistry with James Franco as boyfriend Scotty is so effortless and natural you almost don't notice it. Emile Hirsch disappears into his role as young activist Cleve Jones, as seamlessly as he did with Chris McCandless in the inexcusably underrated
Into the Wild. Josh Brolin, who looks so much like Dan White it's creepy, manages in the space of only a few scenes to show us a man coming apart in ways that are truly terrifying. In fact, the closing moments of the film, when we know Dan is about to kill Harvey, are some of the scariest I can remember witnessing in a movie theater.
Gus Van Sant has captured the look and feel of 1970s San Francisco by filming--gasp!--in San Francisco. Many of the existing storefronts of the Castro were decorated to look as they would have thirty years ago. His use of archival footage is pitch-perfect--it's never distracting, but he knows when to bow to reality. The protest scenes, filmed with large numbers of non-professional extras, including some participants in the original events, look and feel like real protests. I'm particularly fond of the chant "Civil rights or civil war!" although I think it was probably proceeded by "1, 2, 3, 4."
(Note: After reading
this article, it appears the full chant is "Civil rights or civil war! Gay rights now!" which is not rhymie but still pretty badass.)
But best of all, and as it should be, this considerable artistic and technical achievement is placed humbly at the service of a profound and moving story with intense relevance for today. On the one hand,
Milk shows us how much things have changed since the '70s. It's there in the ashamed, averted faces of men arrested at gay bars during the opening credits, in the desperate phone call from a gay teen in the Midwest, or in a brief but intense moment of fear as Harvey, already well known by that point, walks to his store alone at night. On the other hand, we see that some things have not changed at all. You could excise Anita Bryant's and John Briggs's anti-gay rants from the movie and put in Prop 8 campaign ads and have the exact same story.
Milk is not a documentary, but often feels like one. The blending of original and archival footage is never more powerful than in the film's concluding shot of the huge, silent candlelit funeral march from the Castro to City Hall. That shot of the actors at the front of the march was filmed by Van Sant. But that next shot, where the deathly silent crowd of stretches as far as the eye can see? That's real.
The only thing I can compare this film to in terms of authenticity is
The Battle of Algiers--another film that was not a documentary, but almost felt like one because it was written by a participant in the events it depicted and re-enacted by people who had participated in those events, often in the exact locations where they had taken place.
Perhaps some of the power of the movie comes from the fact that
Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black was himself one of those kids in the middle of the country who was inspired by Harvey's example. Aware of his sexuality at an early age, but faced with the triple threat of growing up Mormon, military, and Texan, Black finally saw the documentary
The Times of Harvey Milk as a college student in the mid-'90s. "Texas kept me very quiet,"
Black told the Bay Area Reporter. "I became intensely shy, I had thoughts of suicide. I was a pretty dark kid, because I had an acute awareness of my sexuality, and was absolutely convinced that I was wrong. In his Hope Speech, Harvey Milk says, 'There's that kid in San Antonio, and he heard tonight that a gay man was elected to public office, and that will give him hope.' And when I first heard that speech, it really did that. It really, really gave me hope, for the first time."
This epiphany drove Black to spend nearly half his life, including the years when he worked as the sole Mormon writer on HBO's
Big Love, in a quest to turn Milk's life into a feature film. Numerous screenwriters had been hacking away at adaptations of Randy Shilts's biography
The Mayor of Castro Street for nearly as long, producing
as many as 20 drafts of a screenplay. Robin Williams, Kevin Kline, Daniel Day-Lewis, Kevin Spacey, Richard Gere, James Woods and Steve Carrell were all prospective Harvey Milks at one time or another, although seeing Sean Penn in the role makes any other choice seem almost laughable. Oliver Stone was attached to direct at one point (thank God that fell apart.)
But since Black didn't own the rights to Shilts's book, he took a different approach. He contacted Cleve Jones and Anne Kronenberg and spend weekends driving back and forth between San Francisco and LA, meeting Milk's old friends and listening to Jones's stories. And, perhaps because he had once been a shy gay kid from Texas, he was able to find the emotional core of Harvey's story that had eluded screenwriters for so long.
Was it activist karma that led all the pieces of a film nearly twenty years in the making to fall together now? Whatever the reason, there has probably never been a more relevant time for this film.
I am not a movie crier, but there were a few moments in
Milk that got me. One in particular was on election night for Prop 6, the gay-teacher-firing proposition also known as the Briggs initiative. Everyone on Harvey's staff is watching the election returns, and there is a map of California on the wall where they're marking off the counties--red for pass (like Prop 8, that's bad), green for fail. I recognize that map. It's colored in with marker, not digital on the CNN website, but the county borders are the same. But something very important is different. LA County is green. The Briggs initiative was defeated there 2-to-1, as it was across the state.
This was
thirty years ago. If they could do this in 1978, when homosexuality had been considered a mental illness only a few years before, there is no excuse--none--for the passage of Prop 8 today.
When the Briggs initiative first got on the ballot, polls showed over 60% support for it. Gay rights activists thought it might even pass in San Francisco. Only months later, the initiative went down in a stunning defeat. Why? Because Harvey Milk and other waged a campaign that was unapologetic and spoke the truth about what this initiative represented--bigotry and hatred.
Harvey Milk was no saint--he could be as scheming and equivocal as any politician at times. Witness when he offers a vague promise of alliance with Dan White only to retract it when it becomes politically unwise, or when he races to City Hall to placate a near-riotous demonstration he himself helped organize. A scene in which he basically threatens to torpedo Mayor Moscone's re-election campaign if he lets Dan White back on the board shows how short and slippery the slope from empowerment to manipulation can be. "A homosexual with power--that's scary," Milk says. He says it with a joking smile, but it's no joke.
But there was one principle Harvey never backed down on. It's summed up by his advice to Cleve Jones, who shows up in a suit at the "bourgeois" City Hall. "Never blend in," Milk says. After spending 40 years in the closet, working on Wall Street and making his boyfriends use the back door to his apartment building, Harvey was done with hiding. Perhaps his most important contribution to the gay rights movement was his determination to be unapologetic.
There is a scene in Milk where Harvey goes to a meeting at the lavish, secluded house of the wealthy owners of the Advocate. They show him a flyer opposing Prop 6 on the basis of "human rights." This is garbage, he tells them. It doesn't even say the word "gay" on it. Nor do the endorsements include any gay public figures. He puts the flyer where it belongs--in the fireplace.
Sound familiar, anyone? The gay establishment rears its head!
Milk is not a traditional biopic. It's far more ambitious--and a far better film--than any of the spate of celebrity biopics to come out in recent years. It is the story of a person who both shaped and was shaped by a movement. The personal can't be separated from the political here.
More than anything, Milk is a film about how history drives people to fight back against injustice, whether they expect to or not. Harvey starts the film as a cautious, closeted man who resorts to rendezvouses with strangers in subway stations. He ends the film exhorting his friends to come out, debating bigoted politicians, and speaking to crowds of thousands. What happens in between? A gay man is murdered walking down Castro Street, and the cops seem more interested in raiding bars than investigating it. Crazy Christians try to pass a draconian ballot initiative allowing the firing of gay teachers and anyone who supports them. A lover commits suicide. Something changes in this formerly quiet man and he decides he must fight back. Why? Not because there is anything special about him, but because the alternative is intolerable. He becomes a leader. Why? Not because there is anything special about him, but because he's just not willing to give up.
I saw Milk in New York's East Village, on an atrociously cold, rainy, windy Sunday. We arrived at 3:45 to find the 4pm screening sold out, so we got tickets to the 5pm, which was also nearly sold out. The theater was packed and the audience was rapt. In fact, I can't remember seeing a film where the audience was as "with" the emotions of the story in a long time. I think that is a hopeful sign.
Milk is rated R, although the sexual content and language are mild. It's a shame, because this film should be played in every school in America. I can only hope that some gay teenagers in Kansas or Ohio or wherever will embody Harvey's spirit of resistance and sneak into the theater to see it.
While most of the US is wandering around in a post-holiday coma, Israel has begun what may soon become the most violent action in occupied Palestine in decades.
