Milk Will Recruit You

Grade: A


Harvey Milk, the United States' first openly gay elected official, was assassinated in 1978. Yet over thirty years later, with the passing of Proposition 8 in California, it's amazing how little has changed. In Milk, the clothes and sets are sometimes the only things reminding you it's the 1970s, as anti-gay crusaders make the same arguments they make today. Proposition 8 forms a cloud over the film, reminding us how strongly Harvey's fight continues today.

But our modern failures shouldn't get in the way of an inspiring and extraordinary film. Milk traces Harvey (Sean Penn) from an unhappy suit in New York to his assassination by fellow San Francisco city supervisor Dan White (Josh Brolin). There are boyfriends and personal struggles, sure, but this is not a biopic. The film wisely avoids painting Harvey as a singular hero, showing how he led a far bigger movement. The movie may be called Milk, but this is above all a civil rights movie, doing for the gay community in the 1970s what many other films have done for African-Americans in the 1960s.

Given Harvey's famous opening line, "My name is Harvey Milk, and I am here to recruit you," the biggest compliment I can give the film is that it makes everyone want to get involved and fight, gay or straight. It helps that director Gus Van Sant uses so much real footage. Villain Anita Bryant appears only in archive footage, so you know every ridiculous thing she says is real. But what's also inspiring is the way Harvey fights solely through the political process. He quells riots and sets his efforts on voter registration. Yet he managed to pass a bill protecting homosexuals from work discrimination and defeated Proposition 6, an act that would keep gay teachers out of the schools. For all the deadlock in politics, the movie does show one politician who made a difference.

Milk is Van Sant's first mainstream movie since Finding Forrester in 2000, after a lengthy break for more experimental films like Elephant and Paranoid Park. It paid off. Some of that indie-style is still there, in the home movie clips, the mixing of archive footage with fiction, and the beautiful cinematography. He never goes overboard with the directorial fluorishes; they just give the movie an added oomph. So when a gay kid in a wheelchair calls Harvey because he has no hope, we don't dismiss it as too Hollywood. Van Sant makes it all feel authentic.

It also helps that the cast is uniformly excellent, led by a potentially career-best Sean Penn. He doesn't caricature the fey New York accent, creating a believable impression. But more importantly, he takes a symbolic figure and makes him very human. As for the supporting cast, Josh Brolin has gotten the most attention for his disturbingly normal assassin. James Franco as well does impressive work as Harvey's main boyfriend Scott, who grows from hippie to mustachioed activist. But for me, the stand-out is Emile Hirsch as the stray gay kid Harvey turns into an activist. He disappears so completely into the role you wouldn't even think of Into the Wild or Speed Racer.

With the election so dominant in 2008, last year's movies tend to be considered in political terms. The Dark Knight is the Bush movie, Gran Torino the McCain movie, and so on. But a movie about an unconventional political who got young people excited and mobilized for something they believed in? That's all Obama, regardless of what went down on his election day. And no matter where you stand on the issue of gay rights, it's hard to argue with the movie's closing line, "You've gotta give them hope." In 2009, maybe we can do the same for Harvey's memory.