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.

Review: Frost/Nixon (3.5/5)

Frost/Nixon
(Ron Howard)
Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Kevin Bacon, Rebecca Hall, Toby Jones.
Running time: 122 minutes. (PG)

It was the showdown of 1977. David Frost, the ‘lightweight’ chatshow host getting the first interview with Richard Nixon, who never broke his silence on Watergate. “He’ll be a big wet kiss,” Nixon was told. It became David versus Goliath. Tricky Dicky delved deep into his box of tricks. But he didn’t see the sling shot coming.
Ron Howard takes Peter Morgan’s West End production and turns it into a slick, entertaining piece of popcorn – a battle of impersonating wills. Michael Sheen adds 44%. He gets Frost’s voice down pat, but he’s all external, projecting an irksome goofyness. Every fluctuating thought is worn broadly on his face. Langella’s Nixon is a different animal. His jowls waggle like a St Bernard. His eyebrows could bat Frost across the room. His voice booms with wounded pride. Langella takes Nixon the monster and finds an unlikely seam of humanity in the man – a towering hubris. When his defence cracks, his spirit breaks and he becomes an old man. Langella does it in the merest of glances, without a word said. The moment is edge-of-the-seat electric. Howard overcomes a central problem: how to make an interview dramatically and cinematically interesting. The real interview was a volley of interminable detail. He strips it down and focuses on the politics and battle of wills behind the scenes. Frost/Nixon is politics as pugilistic spectacle. History wrapped in Hollywood gloss. Does it speak of the current times? Only if you desperately want it to.

Review: Valkyrie (2/5)

Valkyrie
(Bryan Singer):
Tom Cruise,
Running time: 120 minutes. (12A)

Here’s the story of a plot to save the world from Tom Cruise. He plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a stiff Nazi who masterminds the true life plot to kill Hitler and overthrow the Reich at the height of World War Two. Only the movie won’t allow Cruise to be himself. It blows off a hand, another three fingers, and deprives him of an eye. But worst of all, it won’t allow him to beam that pearly smile. They might as well have blown off his head.
Cruise, with a supporting cast including Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy and Terence Stamp, is engaged in high treason. Yet, just one minute of The Lives of Others contains more angsty paranoia than this entire film. Valkyrie belongs to what I call the pissing-in-the-wind genre: try as it can, it’s battling against the prevailing wind of history. The plot failed. Hitler lived. Director Bryan (The Usual Suspects) Singer tries to work up some tension, but you can’t get it out of your head. With the outcome in mind, you look for something else: a test of character, perhaps. But Cruise is unflappable – an unemotional, teutonic machismo. Churchill was sweating nightly into his brandy. But Tom’s von Stauffenberg hasn’t a jackboot of self doubt.

Review: Rachel Getting Married (3.5/5)

Rachel Getting Married
(Jonathan Demme):
Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Tunde Adebimpe, Debra Winger.
Running time: 111 minutes.
(15A)

Watching Anne Hathaway in this ensemble drama is akin to seeing a leggy, bug-eyed caterpillar transfigure into a butterfly of grace and iridescence. Hers is the kind of performance that, in any other year, would walk away with an Oscar.
It’s the story of Kym, a human Krakatoa, careering car-crash personality and 5 ft 8’’ bruise, who checks out of rehab for the wedding of her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt). Kym is a reformed drug addict and beats herself up for a sundering family tragedy. Resentment leaks all over the place like toxic waste. The emotions become so raw, they might as well be bathing wounds in salt. Hathaway manages to convey both victim and self-perpetuating martyr. Jonathan (Silence of the Lambs) Demme shoots it as if he were Robert Altman making a European neo-realist movie. Very skilfully, he escorts us into loose, improvised family scenes and slips away. The film in itself is a lovely document of a warts-and-all wedding. The immersion reminds you of the style of French director Abdel (Couscous) Kechiche. But just when you’re settled, the plot of writer Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sydney) demands histrionics and confrontation: screaming matches, car crashes and punch-ups. They are elegantly assembled, but put a strain on the film’s almost invisible structure. In just a few minutes’ screentime, Debra Winger gives Hathaway a run for her money as the distant mother and silent fount of dysfunction. She smiles disingenuously at her kids, offers caring platitudes, but, tellingly, keeps her distance.