Review of Milk

“If a bullet should enter my brain, let the bullet destroy every closet door…”

“My name is Harvey Milk and I’m here to recruit you!”

As far as I am concerned, Milk achieved the impossible. It nearly made my boyfriend cry. He doesn’t ever cry, so nearly is quite an achievement. As for myself, I must have been socially conditioned to embody every tired feminine stereotype… I wept.

Milk is a relatively straightforward biopic of the US’ first openly gay politician, Harvey Milk, elected in 1977 to the San Francisco board of supervisors and assassinated just eleven months later by Irish Catholic Conservative, Dan White. As films go, Milk treads little new ground; but it has a tremendous amount of heart and brims with righteous fervor. And watching Milk, I didn’t find the inevitable comparisons with Martin Luther King, so unlikely. As in the case of Luther King, we can only speculate that if Milk has survived he might have gone on to do even greater things.

Milk opens with archive footage of LGBT persecution, mainly men being expelled by police from gay bars in the fifties and sixties. The archive footage reappears throughout the film, showing news broadcasts from the day and television appeals by evangelist singer Anita Bryant, who led a moralist crusade against the LGBT community in the 1970s. The use of footage is excellent and adds to the realism.

Sean Penn is an astounding actor, and more than capable of playing Harvey Milk. In fact, it’s refreshing to see him not playing his usual racists, murderers and psychopaths. The ensemble cast is pretty damn good too, especially Diego Luna (Y Tu Mamá También) who plays Harvey’s disturbed boyfriend and Josh Brolin (No Country For Old Men) who makes Milk’s killer every bit as despicable as one might hope.

For a film set in seventies America, Milk does not feel that distant. The fight against Proposition 6 – an act to revoke the immunity of Americans from losing their jobs (particularly those working in the education sector where they can “corrupt” kids) on the grounds of sexuality – and the waves of homophobia that accompanied it, are more than reminiscent of the recent Proposition 8, which removed the rights of same sex couples to marriage in the state of California. That too was fought by Christian bigots and evangelist crusaders.

Despite the parallels with today (thirty years on LGBT liberation is still a distant dream) and the film’s tragic ending, Milk is not particularly downbeat. Rather, it’s angry and yet immensely hopeful. Harvey Milk emerges not just as an gay activist, but as a man, a martyr, who stood up for the rights of the elderly, the workers and the disempowered. Go see it: it’s a brilliant film.

Review of Che Part One here.