If you are old enough to remember the life and death of Harvey Milk, you may experience a few unpleasant flashbacks during Gus Van Sant's biopic about the gay politician — not just to the fury and confusion that surrounded his assassination, but to other memories that may have seared themselves into your brain in the 1970s: Anita Bryant. Bad perms. Men in too-short denim cutoffs.
Tampa Bay audiences may find themselves flashing back to more recent history. Milk's election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977 — he was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California — recalls the 2008 run of County Commissioner Kevin Beckner, the first openly gay candidate to win public office in Hillsborough. (That's right — we're only 31 years behind California.) Milk's successful campaign against Proposition 6, which would have banned gay teachers from California public schools, inevitably conjures up the failure last month of activists in California and Florida to defeat amendments banning gay marriage. As for Anita "The Hun" Bryant, seen here in period video, her beauty-queen self-righteousness as she rails against gay rights ordinances seems an eerie precursor to Ronda Storms and Sarah Palin.
So yes, this movie is both timely and discomfiting, in ways the filmmakers could not have predicted. And Sean Penn, in one of the best performances of his career, makes clear why Harvey Milk was such a groundbreaking politician. That said, one might have wished that the film didn't dwell quite so much on the minutiae of vote-getting. Prior to the Prop 6 and Board of Supervisors wins, Milk ran unsuccessfully for office three times, and the film covers all five campaigns, meaning that there are a few too many scenes of election strategizing and into-the-mic speechifying. And while Van Sant manages a seamless blend of quasi-documentary camerawork and archival footage most of the time, a few of the historic re-creations are jarringly clunky — as when we see the same group of extras marching in two different protests.
By contrast, Milk's personal life gets surprisingly short shrift. The script offers us only a glimpse of his closeted Wall Street Republican years; we see Milk wearing a business suit when he meets his soon-to-be-lover, Scott Smith (James Franco), in a N.Y. subway, but then it's whoosh! One night of bliss and they're living in the Castro, quasi-hippies in bad wigs. Penn and Franco share a playful intimacy in their early scenes, but Franco is eventually reduced to looking put-upon and adorable (despite his perm), the neglected political wife. Smith was succeeded as Milk's companion by a neurotic hanger-on named Jack Lira. His place in Milk's life was apparently a puzzle to his friends; in the film, he's truly inexplicable, and Diego Luna is so annoying in the role as to permanently erase any lingering sex-object status that might still cling to him after E Tu Mama Tambien.
But there's nothing wrong with Sean Penn's lived-in, effortless performance as Milk. The temptation in playing such an iconic figure might have been to pump up his flamboyance or overstate his brash New Yawk-iness. Instead, Penn helps us understand what made Milk not just a good politician but a successful flirt: his easy, disarming ability to connect. This quality is evident not only in his scenes with Franco, but in his debates with John Briggs (Denis O'Hare), the homophobe who engineered Prop 6; in his give-and-take with his staff; and in his speech-making. There may be one too many soapbox moments in the script, but Penn is never less than convincing as an orator. You understand why this is a man who moved the masses, who convinced a closeted, beleaguered minority to come out and stay out.
Milk was also a master of maneuvering, not above using others to get what he wanted. "A homosexual with power. That's scary," he declares at one point; it's a comment on a changing political dynamic, but Penn's demeanor also suggests that Milk is happy that he's that homosexual.
Harvey Milk's blind spot, the film suggests, was that he didn't understand the ramifications of the usual political deal-making when it came to his rival on the Board of Supervisors, Dan White, the man who would eventually murder him and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. Van Sant doesn't demonize White anymore than he sanctifies Milk; Josh Brolin's performance is, like Penn's, a model of understatement. Brolin's White is a man in a box, confused and ultimately deranged by his own limitations. That he received only nominal prison time remains as outrageous as ever, but Brolin's performance suggests the inner turmoil that would lead White, after his release, to commit suicide. (Brolin also looks uncannily like White; talk about your uncomfortable flashbacks.)
Milk moved to San Francisco in 1972; he was killed six years later. Even if he hadn't died, he would have occupied a place in American history, but in death he became a martyr, and the film makes heartbreakingly clear what was lost. A poignant irony that carries throughout is the fact that he predicted his own assassination; as a result, he taped his recollections and his wishes for the future. Van Sant uses the taping as a narrative device, periodically returning to scenes of Milk in his kitchen talking into his recorder. Penn is so immersed in the role that he makes even this hackneyed convention work, speaking with a quiet weariness that we don't see anywhere else in the film.
The last words on that tape recording were, "You gotta give 'em hope." It's a tribute to Milk's vision that much of the progress he envisioned for gays and lesbians has come to pass. But Milk is also a reminder that the fight is far from over.
This article appears in Dec 10-16, 2008.