Tomorrow is the thirty year anniversary of the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, by another city supervisor Dan White, who had recently resigned and wanted his job back. Today the biopic Milk opens in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The critics love it. A. O.Scott in the NYTimes:
“Milk” is a fascinating, multi-layered history lesson. In its scale and visual variety it feels almost like a calmed-down Oliver Stone movie, stripped of hyperbole and Oedipal melodrama. But it is also a film that like Mr. Van Sant’s other recent work — and also, curiously, like David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” another San Francisco-based tale of the 1970s — respects the limits of psychological and sociological explanation.
Dan White, Milk’s erstwhile colleague and eventual assassin, haunts the edges of the movie, representing both the banality and the enigma of evil. Mr. Brolin makes him seem at once pitiable and scary without making him look like a monster or a clown. Motives for White’s crime are suggested in the film, but too neat an accounting of them would distort the awful truth of the story and undermine the power of the movie.
That power lies in its uncanny balancing of nuance and scale, its ability to be about nearly everything — love, death, politics, sex, modernity — without losing sight of the intimate particulars of its story. Harvey Milk was an intriguing, inspiring figure. “Milk” is a marvel.
“Milk” was never going to be just another movie, and in a season marked by the simultaneous election of our first black president and the enactment of a gay-marriage ban in California, it’s in danger of becoming primarily a symbol or a statement, and not a movie at all. (For instance, there is an announced boycott of Cinemark theaters showing the film, because of the chain owner’s purported anti-gay politics.) But let’s say the simplest things first: This is an affectionately crafted, celebratory biopic about a sweet, shrewd, hard-assed, one-of-a-kind historical figure. And they can just FedEx the Oscar to Sean Penn’s house right now, so that we don’t have to listen to his acceptance speech.
I don’t know that this is Penn’s best performance, overall — let’s have that debate some other time — but as far as the mannered, immersive impersonations of his later career go, Harvey Milk takes the cake. Penn is such a powerful mimic that there’s a certain danger in assigning him to play a well-documented public personality, especially one with Milk’s quirks and tics. In a city of buff and beautiful gay men, Milk had funny hair, bad clothes (when he broke into politics, he bought three secondhand suits and wore them over and over again), a big honker and an abrasive Long Island accent. He was ferociously loyal to his friends and allies but could be ruthless toward others; his sweetness and compassion concealed a powerful will and a provocative, prankish sense of humor. Penn grabs all these qualities and rides them right to the edge of caricature before somehow, seemingly at the last instant, assembling them into a vital and complicated human character.
That Oscar comment has me thinking that Milk might just get the Best Picture award that Brokeback Mountain missed.
MORE: San Francisco Chronicle, Penn Brilliant As Harvey Milk; Andy Towle has a terrific round-up (with lots of video), “The amount of material hitting various media on Harvey Milk right now is pretty;astonishing”; David Denby in The New Yorker, “Is there an actor in Hollywood braver than Sean Penn?” and NYTimes news story, Activists Seek to Tie ‘Milk’ to a Campaign for Gay Rights.