Milk

I’ve never been a big fan of Sean Penn’s although I guess he’s done some good stuff (not that I follow his career really). It always seemed to me that he was doing his best Marlon Brando or James Dean imitation (maybe Montgomery Clift is in that mix) but never got beyond playing himself playing them. In Milk Mr. Penn has gotten everything right. After about the first 15 minutes of the movie his performance was so good and so riveting that I totally forgot it was a performance. Unlike Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button who disappears behind his make-up; Mr. Penn just disappears. He is so convincing it’s uncanny.

The story of Harvey Milk has pretty much become a legend and the movie preserves that part of history, but it is also a documentary-like primer of what was going on in San Francisco in the mid-1970’s. It was after the hippie Summer-of-Love and before the AIDS crisis but still historically important and you’re bound to come away with something you didn’t know before (aha; a learning experience!). The movie presents a tragedy certainly, but it’s also funny at times and, yes, somehow uplifting and convincingly shows the excitement that must have been coursing through the veins of the activists in the Castro District at that time. Director Gus Van Sant, to his credit, does not try to “clean it up” for a perceived heterosexual audience and illustrates just how sexually charged everyone was within that movement. Everybody was hot to trot, including Harvey, along with all the marching and demanding and yelling in the streets. Very cool. Also cool is the interweaving of archival footage into the narrative, making the presentation even more convincing.

Milk is very fine and very timely. Well, come to think of it, maybe not so timely—but close. I just wish it had come out a couple of months prior to the shame-on-you results of Proposition 8 in California. Maybe two percent of the movie audience, which was the unholy difference in the results of that election, could have been swayed to the side of common sense. I like to think so but, well, reality is tugging me towards a probably-not conclusion. One thing I do know is that I’ve been swayed by Sean Penn into being an admirer. It’s the part and performance of a lifetime for him and I just hope he gets more of the same. It goes beyond being award-worthy as an example of total commitment to a role. We’re not apt to see its like again…unless Mr. Penn somehow pulls another one out of the Hollywood hat.