Milk
In the making of a gay rights icon lies a tale of civic action
In 1972, when he was in his early 40s, Harvey Milk came to San Francisco from New York as part of a wave of gay men and women looking to live openly. The radical new film Gus Van Sant has made of Milk's life gets right down to business. Not far into "Milk," Harvey picks up a stranger in a stairwell. It's Harvey's birthday, and the stranger, Scott Smith, is an uninterested young man whom he works hard to persuade.
Sean Penn plays Harvey, James Franco is Scott, and Penn fully avails himself of Milk's reserves of charm. His hair grown out in waves, the actor re-creates Milk's high, soft speaking voice and, with a few sentences and some down-turned glances, puts across a gallery of contradictions - bashfulness and extroversion, confidence and doubt, lust and restraint. Smith goes home with him almost out of curiosity. You get a glimpse of what, in part, would make Milk, a banker by trade, such a good elected official; he was a gentle but committed seducer.
Van Sant follows them to Harvey's, shooting their first "date" in tight, almost lilting close-ups in which facial expressions and body parts flicker by, swaddled in the mischievous "la-la-las" in Danny Elfman's score. The sequence sets the tone for the rest of the movie. Van Sant wants us to see Milk the way Milk saw himself, both in that moment and in the relationship that grows out of it - as a sexual being teeming with love. This opening also leaves no doubt about the explicit nature of the political odyssey on which Milk winds up embarking: This is what they do in their bedrooms. The sex is a private but inextricable extension of a larger human-rights issue.
By nearly every measure, "Milk" is a beautifully made, far less conventional movie biography than most. Van Sant, working from a screenplay by Dustin Lance Black, isn't simply telling the story of a politician. He has undertaken an expanding cultural portrait. The focus grows from a man to a street to a neighborhood to a city to a country. It would have been easy for Van Sant to turn Milk into a cause for righteousness, to let the politics indignantly overwhelm the film. But Van Sant doesn't preach to the choir. He doesn't preach at all. For that matter, neither does Milk.
For Milk, politics sprouted from necessity. Despite opening a camera shop on Castro Street, increasingly the center of gay San Francisco, he and Scott were barred from the neighborhood business association and decided to start their own. There Harvey gets a taste for the power of activism. He announces his first campaign for city supervisor while standing on a box with "soap" stenciled on the side and assembles a campaign staff of much younger, average-looking guys - apostles - who work as hard as their boss.
Harvey even plucks one kid, Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch), off the street. Harvey obviously finds him cute, but Cleve also happens to have sharp campaign instincts. These men and, eventually, a young, fiercely permed lesbian named Anne Kronenberg (Alison Pill) fight to get Harvey elected (it takes a couple of tries). The last campaign costs Harvey his relationship with the long-suffering Scott. As an elected official, his cause becomes defeating Proposition 6, a bill that would legalize firing openly gay teachers and school employees who supported gay rights.
The bill needs the support of the other supervisors, and Harvey goes after a stressed-out, conservative family guy named Dan White (Josh Brolin), who will eventually kill both him and Mayor George Moscone. Harvey thinks White might be gay. White seems jealous of Harvey's popularity and political success. There's great psychological tension in Brolin, a good actor whose performances always have charisma but rarely much heart. This is the warmest he's ever been in a movie. He dares you to have pity on White.
White's envy would have been understandable. Milk was a natural leader. The movie makes it hard not to see in him a little of Barack Obama or vice versa. The similarities are chilling at times. They both ran as agents for change, a message that drew people to them, especially the young, and managed to win the support of folks in spite of their own bigotry. What you're able to see is how far the country has come in four decades and how far it hasn't. The day of Obama's victory, voters also supported gay marriage bans in three states. Go figure.
As Milk, Penn captures what made the man and the official so magnetic. A lot has to do with the smile that frequently breaks across his taut, lined face. I can't recall a piece of acting where that expression has managed to put across as much as it does here. Rightly or not, you expect Penn to blow the house down, the way he did in "Mystic River" and "All the King's Men." This time the Big Bad Wolf is really a sheep.
What's surprising about "Milk" is how much creative fun Van Sant has under the serious circumstances. The movie makes clever use of archival footage with anti-gay activist Anita Bryant and of men privately gathered in bars. He and his ingenious cinematographer Harris Savides shift film stocks and camera formats. A rallying telephone call from Cleve breaks the screen into at least 25 frames. And the climactic shooting is an eerie remix of the high-school massacre in Van Sant's best movie, 2003's "Elephant."
"Milk" is also as immersed in civic process as it is in sexual congress. How ironic that a filmmaker who so often breaks the established rules of storytelling and invents his own would make a movie so riveted by the passing of laws. Some of these sequences feel like moments from the great Frederick Wiseman's social documentaries.
Not everything works. Diego Luna, as Harvey's unstable post-Scott boyfriend, appears to have wandered over from some drunken college production of Pedro Almodovar's "Bad Education." And the decision to structure the film around a premonitory recording Milk made not long before his murder deprives the film of its momentum but never to the point of ruining what's remarkable about the movie itself.
Van Sant, who is openly gay, rarely uses movies for direct politics. Until now, the homosexuality in his movies was more sudden, random, and homoerotic - kisses here, glances there. "Milk" changes that. It's the rare major film dealing with homosexuality that doesn't orbit around the closet. The men are mostly, proudly out. And Van Sant himself doesn't hold much back - even the appearance of a Judy Garland song chills the soul. Playing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" requires a certain gumption. But the song has never sounded more like a hymn than it does here.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston .com/ae/movienation.
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