Review: Milk (4/5)

Milk
(Gus Van Sant):
Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Emile Hirsch, James Franco, Diego Luna.
Running time: 127 minutes.


Milk, the new film from Gus Van Sant, comes bottled in a great American tradition — the Hollywood biopic. It’s the warming but ultimately poignant story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to office in the United States. He helped foster a new era of civil rights for homosexuals before his dreams were curdled in the form of a fatal bullet.
And watching Milk in action, it’s hard not to see the comparison with another movie ancestor who took a bullet — the figure in John Ford’s 1939 biographical masterpiece Young Mr Lincoln. There, in a great scene, the future president, played by Henry Fonda, took his life into his hands by putting himself in the way of a lynch mob. It was hard to tell what stopped them: Lincoln’s wise council, or Fonda’s aw-shucks dulcet delivery. Sixty years later, there’s Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk at it too. He gets up in front of a mob in San Francisco and turns a riot into a protest march. At another gathering, he speaks despite the threat of assassination. His conviction that all men are created equal is straight from Lincoln, while his ability to connect disenfranchised voters with a message of hope (“we’ve got to give them hope”) was delivered while the new American president Barack Obama was still wearing his Superman pyjamas.
Milk charts the birth of his idealism in the counterculture of the 1970s, a man who left the closet aged 40. From a small camera shop in the gay friendly Castro district of San Francisco, surrounded by his boyfriend (James Franco) and his election team, he turned gay power into a political force and ran for election, before fighting a bitter campaign against banning gay teachers from schools. He did it all with disarming charm. It seems ridiculous now how many attempts it took him to get elected. Milk was running not for president, nor senator, nor mayor, but for supervisor of a city district.
But then that’s not really a surprise. Look how uncomfortable, 30 years later, Hollywood is with gay films. In I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, Adam Sandler looked embarrassed playing a straight man pretending to be gay. And that film was supposed to be a sop. Meanwhile, the characters of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, in the groundbreaking Brokeback Mountain, struggled with guilty feelings in a film that was fixed firmly in a heterosexual world. But Milk plays everything in the open. Almost all its characters are happily gay. The only objection comes from the straight community – when Harvey first opens the camera store in Castro, a trader from across the street shakes his hand but wipes it with a hanky. “There’s man’s law and then there’s God’s law,” he tells them. Sean Penn and James Franco respond with a snog on the street. Of course, openness has its problems. There’s one scene, shot in a haze of paranoia, where Milk walks home alone on an empty street with nothing but the sound of footsteps behind him. The background is out of focus. Is he going to pay the price for his openness? Will he be attacked by a studio boss looking to put the kibosh on the film?
Milk is full of great supporting performances, from Emile Hirsch, who wears a tumbleweed for hair, and who plays a troubled runaway who finds fuel in Milk’s politics, to Josh Brolin, who sulks his way through another picture. He plays Dan White, the troubled Irish-American Catholic elected to the district at the same time as Milk, who can’t quite figure out if he should hate him or respect him, with grave results.
And then there’s Penn. If Harvey Milk was a carton, he’d be a half pint. Penn, normally larger than his own shadow, seems smaller than himself, even brittle. He looks as if he’s punched an extra hole in his belt just to keep his trousers up. He slips into the character with velvet invisibility. Penn has downsized and produced a career-defining performance. His Milk is a man of generous spirit, courageous energy and presidential charm. And then there’s his sense of humour. “I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to licking you,” he tells one petrified opposing candidate. “In the polls”.
The film, too, marks a drop in volume for Gus Van Sant. He has traded the avant garde stylistics of his recent films for a mainstream, classical style. It works beautifully. For Milk is a deft and generous character study. It’s full of feeling and spliced with nostalgia shored up from reams of archival footage that evoke a period of hope and change before the despair of the Aids-ravaged 1980s.
The film opens with a powerful sequence: black and white 1950s footage of men being hauled out of gay bars and thrown into paddywagons. They try to hide their shame with hands to their faces. It’s a statement that things aren’t going to be this way in Milk. And they’re not. For the tone of Milk is pride. It burns brightly with the filament of hope. It’s a fitting film at a time when the rest of the world is looking towards another kindred spirit. Harvey Milk would be leading the cheers for Obama’s new era of openness.