Playing it Straight

Gus Van Sant tones down the experimentation for his biopic of Harvey Milk, the first gay man elected to U.S. office.


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Published: Nov 25, 2008

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HALF AND HALF: Man's man Sean Penn strikes the right balance swish and steel as gay politician Harvey Milk.

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What gets the opponents of gay marriage riled up is not the radical upending of a sacred rite but the movement's inherent conservatism. It may strike some as an attempt to buy into a hoary and largely devalued institution, but there's something powerful (and, to opponents, deeply troubling) about asserting the right of gays and lesbians to be as unremarkable as everyone else.

After the thrilling experimentation of Gerry, Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park, it's hard not to be underwhelmed by Gus Van Sant's Milk. The movie represents a giant stride back in the direction of conventional filmmaking, both in terms of cinematic style and its approach to historical truth. Van Sant's four previous films — as great a run of sustained inspiration as any in contemporary cinema — were skeptical and multivalent in their approach to real-life events, omitting markers ("Columbine" or "Kurt Cobain") that would make any claim on reproducing the past. But in Milk, the names are resolutely unchanged.

Written by Dustin Lance Black, whose credits include the TV series Big Love, Milk takes us through the requisite biopic paces: Harvey Milk's transformation from closeted New York actuary to out-and-proud San Francisco businessman, and his journey from being a community activist to becoming the first openly gay man elected to major public office in the U.S. — and, less than a year later, the first to be assassinated. Less explicitly, it also covers the birth of the religious right, the shift from local opposition to changing mores to a national, faith-driven movement, which strikes a particularly resonant chord in a political landscape soured by the likes of Proposition 8.

Given the biopic's endemic middlebrow orientation, which Black's script does nothing to dispel, Van Sant is in the position of trying to paint a masterpiece with one arm tied behind his back. There's no question that Milk is less viscerally exciting than the movies that precede it, but the movie's very conventionality is what makes it extraordinary. The movie treats Harvey Milk as other movies would JFK or Martin Luther King, Jr.: a great but flawed man who was cut down before his actions had a chance to fully bear fruit.

Although many of its characters are not completely out, Milk takes place in an uncloseted world. Homosexuality is not a crisis, or a problem to be solved, but an almost incidental fact. When Harvey (Sean Penn) picks up Scott Smith (James Franco), who would become his live-in lover for the next six years, in a subway staircase, there's no hint of angst or danger in the exchange; it's casual, almost lighthearted. One of the most striking moments in the movie is when Harvey winds up an inspirational speech to the young Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch) with the suggestion that they cruise the nearest bus stop.

A self-styled man's man, Penn might have seemed a strange choice to play Milk, who, after his election as San Francisco city supervisor, introduced himself to Mayor George Moscone (Victor Garber) as the city's "number one queen." But Penn strikes the perfect balance of steel and swish. When he exhorts a crowd by shaking his fists, his wrists flop but his forearms bulge, the muscles alive and ready for a fight.

Like most biopics, Milk's dramatis personae is stuffed to overflowing, but Van Sant draws sharp and individuated performances from his actors, including those, like anti-gay activist and orange juice pitchwoman Anita Bryant, who play themselves through the use of well-chosen stock footage. The movie's trickiest part is that of Dan White (Josh Brolin), the conservative city supervisor who crawled through a window in San Francisco's City Hall to shoot Milk and Moscone dead in their offices. White's lawyers infamously blamed his junk-food intake, but Milk endorses the theory that White may have been closeted himself, a half-convincing rationale that Brolin wisely leaves ambiguous. The main feeling that emanates from Dan White is a sense of profound unhappiness and insecurity, a sense that he is far less at ease with himself than are Harvey and his compatriots. Harvey Milk belongs in the movie's world. Dan White does not.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Milk | Directed by Gus Van Sant | A Focus Features release