Milk

2008

Director Gus Van Sant

Native Americans? Check. African-Americans? Check. Women? Checkedy check. Hollywood is quickly running out of groups to pretend they care about. They like to do their pandering in turn, ensuring each group receives the maximum amount of media attention. Or rather, ensuring that Hollywood’s professed ‘love’ for these poor, poor people is on full display for all to see; and hopefully we’ll just forget about the previous century of cinema in which these groups were generally treated like shit. But the well of patronization is running dry. Fuck it, let’s do the gays!

Gus Van Sant’s 2008 biopic Milk follows the eclectic life of the titular Harvey Milk, who became the first openly gay person elected to public office in California before his assassination in 1978 by fellow city supervisor Dan White.

The opening sentiments of this review are incredibly unfair. Milk is both a well-constructed and beautifully well-acted film that is deserving of praise. But it does little else to alter the cynical atmosphere haunting every reel. Hollywood Goes Gay. That we’re supposed to be pleased that they have finally caught up with the sane world is really rather galling. It’s the same, lingering feeling after Kevin Costner courted Native Americans in Dances With Wolves or Michael Mann turned Muhammad Ali into a fucking superhero in Ali.

Milk is late to the party. Ang Lee’s magnificent Brokeback Mountain three years earlier is about so much more than simply championing homosexuals. Milk, well, isn’t. It is an admirable, moral piece of work, and its heart is completely in the right place, but it all just feels a little forced.

Sean Penn underplays it perfectly as Milk, complimenting his portrayal with enough camp mannerisms but never veering into stereotype. Josh Brolin is predictably excellent as the bitter Dan White, a simmering kettle of a man; although the hints at White’s own confused sexuality feels somewhat contrived. Other sterling support comes from Emile Hirsch as the young gay militant Cleve Jones, and James Franco as Milk’s lover Scott Smith, the only character who reminds us that not all homosexual men are flamboyant or effeminate.

Van Sant - his own homosexuality is rendered oddly meaningless in this mediocre context - is a fairly eclectic director, famous for his riveting portrayals of persecuted humanity through such work as My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting or Elephant - we’ll forget about Psycho, eh? Milk is a worthy continuation of this lineage, albeit in a forgettable, incidental, rather unimaginative way.

*** ½ / *****