Gus Van San, Focus Features (08)

Gus Van Sant's Milk starts with a police raid on a 60s San Francisco gay bar and this simple black and white archive footage of grown men with hands over their faces cowering from the camera sets the tone for the two hours that are to follow; it's an angry and at times awkward film, but with a hell of a lot of style.

It's also shot through with moments of wobbly Hollywoodisation that sit uneasily with the story at its heart, which is unfortunate. If anyone's story is already giftwrapped for the Hollywood treatment it is surely Harvey Milk's, the San Francisco political activist who genuinely shook-up the system, made a media star of himself in the process, and who died violently at the hands of a lunatic assailant Dan White (played with a cunning, bumbling wit by Josh 'Is it just me, or is he hot?' Brolin).

Does this colourful and exciting tale of human courage and, at times, (movie) star ego mania need extra ribbons and bows? Not really, which is why when the extra baubles are hung on this cinematic tree it threatens to fall over so dangerously. Milk starts with its protagonist, (Sean Penn as a sort of intellectual fist-fighter with a soft spot for the bad boys) suffering from a drunken mid-life crisis. On camera for most of the two-hours, Penn has the difficult job of conveying the complexity of Milk's personality and at times selfish motivations without isolating an audience weaned on Will & Grace mainstream depictions of contemporary (and acceptable) homosexuality.

That he pulls it off is a sign of Penn's hard-bitten skills as an actor (though his performance does at times threaten to burst into flames it is so flamboyant), and his Milk is not so much likeable as respectable (a reality which is probably nearer the truth than the Milk anthologising-industry will have us believe). A fast-learning and media-savvy politician, Milk was able to spot an opportunity, exploit any opening, and always make sure that the camera was on him when it mattered, though these skills were learnt and not born to him, as Milk demonstrates.

As he tells newfound friend and lover Scott Smith at the beginning of the film 'I'm forty years old and I've done nothing my life that I'm proud of'. Thus determined to change his life, Milk takes off for San Francisco at the start of the 70s, with a ponytail, a beard and a hippyish intent to change himself, if not the world. Facing discrimination in San Francisco's Castro from fellow traders after opening a camera shop, he organises boycotts (first of local, discriminatory shop-owners, then, at the behest of a local union, of Coors beer from gay bars in the area).Targeted support for pro-gay businesses follows and, on the back of his success and organisational zeal, Milk slips into City Hall political campaigning on a journey which eventually (very eventually) sees him elected to local office on an openly gay (and perhaps more interestingly, openly Left Wing) Democratic ticket.

This stop-start campaign (and before Milk won political acceptance there were a lot of stops) draws Milk further into the political mainstream, strengthens his links to the unions and minorities ('I reached downwards, not upwards' as he famously put it, explaining how he built a power-base to challenge the Democrat machine) and ultimately gets to make a name for himself opposing the growing anti-gay movement headed by religious-Right figurehead (and what a figurehead - those eyes, those cheekbones, that seductive, cooing voice) Anita Bryant.

Anyone familiar with Armistead Maupin's emblematic Tales of the City will be familiar
with the changing cultural and social tone of the times and how Bryant and her
contemporaries found themselves being faced-down by the next wave of the civil
rights movement in the mid-70s (first came the blacks, then the women and then the
gays), but what comes across here is the pure visceral thrill of those campaigns, fought
out in public debates, through television chat shows and on public podiums before an
educated and eager public hungry for more.Van Sant demonstrates, in these quick and
snappy sequences, a real and infectious feel for the tone of those debates, and he and
his editor cut through Milk's drama with news footage and archive of the time which
shows how engaging these debates were of the mainstream public imagination. The
result is thrilling filmmaking; urgent, angry, involving, and with great hair and fashions
on the side (and then of course there is the music - it's social activism to a disco
beat).

So it's unfortunate that he and writer Dustin Lance Black cannot hold back from
puncturing this Made For The Screen story with Made For Television moments; a
frightened gay teen phones Milk to tell him he must escape his home, but cannot run
away, because (gulp) he is in a wheelchair; Milk's final sight is of the Opera building
across the road publicising the opera he so loves (Tosca - and there's a very writerly
moral in there somewhere, obviously), while at the very end Milk’s ex-lover (James
Franco, sporting the kind of cheekbones cinematographers live and die for) accompanied by his political manager think that Milk's death has gone unacknowledged, but, wait (turn around!), look at all the people walking down the street holding candles. It puts lump in your throat, doesn't it?

Well, no...more

review: Allen Therisa

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