Like People in History: Write-up of Milk
The most pleasant surprise so far in film this year has been Milk. You have to set aside your preconceived notions of Sean Penn, and what a major arsehole he is in real life, and see the picture with eyes as fresh as possible.
What strikes you immediately is what a departure this is for Penn, playing the sweet-natured, relentlessly hopeful Harvey Milk, who quits his establishment job in New York to move with new lover Scott (James Franco) to San Francisco, where they hope to invent a new life together. They find that the Castro neighborhood is not the tranquil Eden they'd expected, and so Harvey sets out to create a world in which they and their friends and neighbors can live their lives without fear or disruption. His community organizing leads him into a series of failed attempts at running for public office, and his commitment to the cause of empowering gay men ultimately destroys his relationship with Scott, whom Harvey has been neglecting on his crusade.
Penn disappears into the role, a triumph of Method acting. What's remarkable, though, as Harvey find his voice, and pursues his objectives with steel-like determination, is how similar the role is to the others that have brought Penn acclaim. Penn is known for playing tough guys, men's men who bury their emotions in bravura in a form of masculine self-defense that must be overcome to redeem them (in the case of the killer in Dead Man Walking) or that leads to their destruction (in the case of the father in Mystic River).
By contrast, Harvey Milk wears his heart on his sleeve; he's all heart, and yet just as tough as Penn's earlier characters. There is a forcefulness to his love, perhaps best displayed at a meeting/party planning a response to Proposition 6, a ballot initiative to fire all gay and lesbian teachers in the state of California. Harvey tells the activists gathered in San Francisco that the only way to stop the initiative is for everyone to come out. He then asks them who in the room has not come out to their families. Several of them haven't. He challenges one of his closest supporters to call his parents on the spot and tell them that he's gay. On the one hand, it's going too far, almost forcing people to do something they're not ready for; politically, though, he was exactly right.
What resonates in the film, and even today, is Milk's total commitment to saving everyone. As he has his early successes, he gets a phone call from a young man whose parents want to send him to a heterosexual re-education camp. He tells the young man to leave, get on a bus, go to the nearest city. He has to get out of there to save himself. Again, the advice is extreme, but the point is as clear as it is harrowing: if your life requires you to compromise the essence of who you are, then by living that way you are helping to kill your own soul. We can't so much save each other as encourage each other to save ourselves.
The film is not perfect, but it is very, very good. There are some excessive moments -- the sequence where Milk is shot, in which he stares in slo-mo at the opera house across from City Hall -- is a bit odd. The bits with Dan White, Harvey's train-wreck colleague and murderer, are wonderfully understated -- the prelude to the murder is a short time-lapse sequence of White in his living room, staying up all night - finally, he's in his briefs, peering through the curtains.
What's incredibly impressive about the film is that it places the experiences of gay men in their historical context, and tells a story that's unfamiliar to most of us. The timing was incredibly fortuitous as well, with its narrative of the struggle against Prop 6 coming out in theatres just as Prop 8 had been passed by California voters. This is perhaps the first non-documentary American film to treat gay men like people in history. The fact that it couldn't be made for some 30 years after the events it covers is an indictment of our culture. But it's a story that all gay men, and all Americans, should know. It's easy to participate in your own oppression when you're ignorant of your own history. That's why slaves were not allowed to learn to read. Gay men have no such excuse for their own cultural illiteracy, but here's hoping more films in this vein will help tell our stories.
