Milk: The Official Geekscape Review

“This is to be played only in the event of my death by assassination. I fully realize that a person who stands for what I stand for, an activist, a gay activist, becomes the target or the potential target of someone who is insecure, terrified, afraid, or very disturbed themselves“

Harvey Milk spoke these words, and a lot more, into a tape recorder in November of 1977, a little more than a year before his assassination by fellow San Francisco city supervisor Dan White. Being a forerunner in any kind of civil rights movement, Harvey Milk knew he was a walking target, and that standing up for something as controversial as gay rights meant being subject to very real danger. Sadly, Harvey’s intuition as to his fate was justified.

I can’t think of a movie in recent memory with a more appropriately timed release than Gus Van Sant’s latest film Milk. This biopic of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person ever elected to public office in United States history, was released mere weeks after a ballot passed in Milk’s home state of California banning gay marriage. Not only that, but Milk was released almost 30 years to the day of his assassination. All of these things combined give Milk somewhat of an eerie and powerful resonance.

Director Gus Van Sant has made some truly great films (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting) some terribly self indulgent ones (Elephant, Gerry) and one unforgivable remake (Psycho) but I think Milk might go down as the one he’s most remembered for. Van Sant brought his A-Game here, no doubt due to the fact that being a gay man himself, he knew what Harvey Milk’s story means to those in LGBT community. In other words, he really couldn’t afford to fuck this one up. This man’s story is too important to us. In a lot of ways, this is Van Sant’s most mainstream film next to Good Will Hunting, gay subject matter or not. He drops some of his more artsy fartsy inclinations and just gives us Harvey’s story, plain and simple. And the film succeeds because of it.

The cast here is superb. Sean Penn is one of those actors whom I have great respect for, but that I personally can’t stand. He’s humorless and self important, and is one of those annoying celebs who hates media attention of any kind, causing him to be thrown in jail for punching out photographers on occasion; but I can’t deny that the man is talented. Sadly, more often than not, Penn chooses characters who are as dour and humorless as he seems to be in real life, thus sucking the fun out of watching him on screen. Most of his most lauded roles have been gravely voiced anti-social types (Mystic River, Dead Man Walking) who fit him like a glove, but aren’t really what I call a stretch for Penn acting wise. However, in the form of Harvey Milk, Penn has maybe the greatest role of his career so far by playing someone so far removed from who he really is. To be honest, I can’t remember him being this jovial and just plain likable since playing Jeff Spicolli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

James Franco plays Milk’s longtime companion Scott Smith, and while the role isn’t an overly complicated one, he brings a subtle sweetness and patience to the part. The rest of the main cast is rounded out by a nearly unrecognizable Emile Hirsch as Cleve Jones, an intern for Milk’s political campaigns and future human rights activist himself, Alison Pill as Anne Kronenberg, the only woman in Milk’s inner circle, and Diego Luna as Jack Lira, Milk’s troubled younger lover. Playing a smaller, but important, part is Victor Garber of Alias as Mayor George Moscone-who was killed alongside Harvey Milk by the same man. I’ll admit to having a chuckle that uber hetero actor Sean Penn was playing the queeny Harvey Milk, while Garber, a gay man and well known lover of young latin men (much like the real Harvey was) was playing the straight Moscone. And of course there’s Josh Brolin as Harvey’s killer Dan White, but I’ll get to him later.

The movie opens in an unusual way, with black and white newsreel footage from what appears to be the 50’s or 60’s, of dozens of men being rounded up and arrested for being in a gay bar. Born in 1930, this is the world that Harvey Milk grew up in, one where being gay meant you had to lie to everyone; your family, your friends, your employers, Yourself. Before 1969, not only was being gay a crime, but congregating with other gay people was considered a crime as well, in most states. I found the use of this footage to be an ingenious way of starting the movie off, reminding the audience just how absurd things once were in our “free” society. The movie then flashes to television news footage of representative (and future senator) Diane Fienstein, telling a shocked press that Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor Moscone have been shot and killed, and that the sole suspect in the murders is fellow city councilman Dan White. Apparently, this scene was recreated with actors, but the original tv news footage is so powerful and memorable, that they simply chose to let it be, and I think that was a smart choice.

Then we are introduced to Harvey Milk himself, living in New York on the eve of his 40th birthday. He meets a cute young hippy named Scott on a subway platform, and convinces him to spend his birthday evening with him. Not only do they spend the night together, but the two fall in love and move to San Francisco together in 1972 – a city still recovering from the flower child hippy years (actually, the city never really did get over that era). Together, Harvey and Scott open a camera shop in the heart of what would be San Francisco’s famous gayberhood, the Castro. Not merely content with being just an openly gay business owner, which at the time was still a pretty daring thing to be, Harvey became an early champion of gay civil rights. To put this all in the proper historical context, this was merely 3 years after the Stonewall riots which launched the modern day gay civil rights movement, and still two years away from homosexuality being taken off the books as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Board. And yet, in this time period, here was Harvey Milk, organizing his community in a way that no one ever really had before, and against fairly overwhelming odds.

Harvey decides to run for city supervisor not once, but three times in the early 70’s. He loses each time. His partner Scott, his campaign manager, grows increasingly tired of having to share Harvey with his political ambitions. Franco plays Scott as a simple man, but not a simpleton. He just wants to have a quiet life with his boyfriend, but leaves once he figures out that is never going to happen; Harvey’s ambitions have grown far beyond his little camera shop. By 1977, Harvey Milk is finally elected as supervisor for the city of San Francisco, making him the first openly gay person ever to hold public office. He held that position for 11 months before he was killed.

It’s at this point in the narrative that we are introduced to the movie’s two main villains: Harvey’s fellow city supervisor Dan White (Josh Brolin) and Anita Bryant, a former beauty queen, gospel singer and TV spokesperson who started a national campaign against gay rights in the late 70’s. Opting not to cast an actress in the part, and instead using old tv footage, the film makers struck gold here. No actress could have been as ludicrously cheesy and ridiculous as Bryant was herself (although I would have cast Parker Posey if I had to cast someone). Anita Bryant is still alive, and a part of me is glad that she’s lived long enough to see herself as a vilified and archaic symbol of intolerance, while Harvey Milk is seen as a pioneer and a martyr (that’s my classier way of saying IN YOUR FACE, BITCH!) However, old Anita footage and all, it’s Josh Brolin who really shines here as Dan White. In a city where the majority was actually made up of ethnic minorities, gays, and hippies, White was just your average white guy – his insecurities, anger managment issues, and inferiority complex were his undoing. Not being able to handle a city where he was out-shined in terms of public support and press by a queer shop-owner and a liberal-leaning mayor, White decided to kill them both.

Much of the movie’s narrative is lifted directly from the Oscar winning 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. So much so that all the news footage in the movie seems to be a direct lift from footage used in the documentary, or an exact re-creation of it. There are a few notable things in the movie that aren’t from the documentary though, like the notion that Harvey suspected Dan White of being a closet case homosexual, which is something first referenced in the book The Mayor of Castro Street (once a working title for this movie).

Also unlike the documentary, Van Sant’s film chooses to focus almost soley on Harvey’s actual life, and doesn’t deal much with the aftermath of his murder or the trial of Dan White. White was ultimately not convicted of pre meditated murder but manslaughter, due to his lawyers submitting the ridiculous and infamous “Twinkie Defense”, claiming his addiction to junk food had caused his temporary mental instability. With this ridiculous assertion, Dan White’s jury saw fit to give him only 7 years in prison. I couldn’t make something like that up if I tried. Luckily, White did the world a favor and killed himself in 1984. All of this would make an interesting film on its own, but I bellieve that Van Sant was wise to concentrate on Harvey’s life and not his death.

One thing I keep seeing brought up in the media is that the film is a strong opinion of how little has changed since Harvey’s day, as 30 years later the gay community has suffered yet another huge blow with the passing of Prop 8 in California. (In Harvey’s day the issue was Prop 6, trying to ban gay teachers in public shcools; it really seems like there’s always some fucked up “Prop” in the way).

However, while recent events certainly reminded us of how the gay community’s enemy is the exact same one as it was 30 years ago (the crazy religious right) I couldn’t help but think of how much HAS changed since Harvey’s day. Long gone are the days when someone could legally fire you from a job for your sexual preference, or deny you housing, or prohibit you from congregating with others like you . In 1978, Milk was the first openly gay elected official; in 2008 we have an openly gay member of the House of Representitives and even a Transexual mayor in Oregon. In fact, there are more than 600 openly gay or lesbian elected officials serving now in North America. Things have changed, they just haven’t changed enough, and while watching Milk all I could think of was how badly we need an inspirational leader like that again to unite us. And as much as I love Ellen, no…she doesn’t count. We need another Harvey Milk.

In the same recording that Harvey Milk made predicting his own assassination, he also said the following, which was as true then as it is now:

“I hope they take the frustration and madness and instead of demonstrating or anything of that type, I would hope they would take the power and I would hope that five, ten, a hundred, a thousand will rise. I would like to see every gay doctor come out, every gay lawyer, every gay architect come out. Stand up and let the world know. That would do more to end prejudice than anyone could ever imagine. I urge them to do that, urge them to come out. Only then will we be able to achieve our rights.“