MO - December 2008 - (Page 24) p/reviews Click here to comment on these stories. FEATURE FILM REVIEW MILK Is A Powerful Piece Of Cinema Reviewed by Matthew McQuilkin Directing: AActing: A Writing: ACinematography: B+ Editing: AOverall: AIt’s tempting to laud Milk as an extraordinary film worthy of its bevy of Oscar-baiting—but that’s just coming from the gay perspective. It will be interesting to see how this plays to mainstream audiences. As directed by Gus Van Sant, who likes to seriously challenge his audiences every once in a while (he did it quite effectively with both Gerry and Elephant), this is as straightforward as it gets. Van Sant depicts the lives of gay people in the seventies realistically and unapologetically, never backing down when the content might make Middle America squirm. And kudos to him for that, but it may make the difference between this and the extraordinary response given to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain three years ago. That was a similarly tragic film, but it had copious amounts of romance going for it—Lee didn’t much candycoat the one gay sex scene the movie had, but he waited to show it until the audience had been hooked in by the love story. Milk, on the other hand, is an unabashedly political tale. Sure, there are relationships, and plenty of sexuality, but it all exists only to bring dimension to the characters; it’s not the story itself. Harvey Milk’s rise, and subsequent knocking down, as the first openly gay man to be elected to public office, is. As such, Milk is the type of movie that either preaches to the choir or is ignored by the larger portion of the public with no vested interest in gay history. One can only imagine what it’s like to watch this film as part of a gay audience in San Francisco—it must be extraordinary. It’s virtually guaranteed to elicit a visceral, emotional response to gay audiences, period. It certainly did me. But when it comes to everyone else, its amazing timeliness in the wake of California’s Proposition 8 notwithstanding, it lacks a distinctly cinematic sense of universality. True love, that’s the kind of thing everyone in the movie theatre can get behind—but political activism is far less glamorous. That said, Milk still has an amazing roster of actors delivering stellar performances, without a doubt the one thing that makes it a must-see, regardless of the nature of the P H O TO BY P HIL BR AY story. There are several recognizable faces that disappear not just under makeup and wigs, but in the skill of delivery. It’s a relief to see Sean Penn back in front of the camera, doing what he has always done best. After seeing him as Harvey Milk, it’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the part. Every speech inflection and every mannerism is meticulously studied but comes across as natural. Playing his first lover with disarming ease is James Franco (no trace of Spider-Man’s pompous friend here). Y Tu Mama También’s Diego Luna looks more like a drunk, Hispanic Rob Schneider than himself as Milk’s scruffy, mentally unstable second lover. Affecting the effeminacy perhaps a tad too much, and yet in a way that somehow makes him endearing, is Into the Wild’s Emile Hirsch. And as the paranoid, homicidal homophobe Dan White, we see Josh Brolin, so convincing he’s hardly distinguishable from the actual archival footage of White himself. Arguably the biggest tragedy is that we can’t have such high-profile stories of iconic gay figures in which they actually live—happily, even!—instead of ending in fatal violence. Hopefully that day will come soon, but for now we have these kinds of “we must never forget” stories to tell. And for what it is, Gus Van Sant tells it very well. It feels slightly odd that Dan White is never given any concrete motivation for what he does; although Brolin plays him ingeniously, Dustin Lance Black’s script reduces him to a man whose insecurities apparently turned him into a nut case overnight. The film ends with the incident coming off as just as senseless as it did in real life, and if that was Van Sant’s intention, he absolutely succeeded. Whether that lack of closure helps or hinders the impact of the film is an open question. Ultimately, Milk is a powerful piece of cinema, and unusually so for a film about a political figure. Gus Van Sant presents a group of imperfect people doing the best they can with what they have to work with, and finally working what seems like miracles through the sheer force of their tireless dedication. The same could be said of how the film itself got made, by extremely talented people who make incredible performances look easy. Milk opens November 26 at the Landmark Egyptian Theatre, 805 E Pine Street, Seattle. Read more of Matthew’s reviews of current and past films on the Web at http://cinema-holic. livejournal.com. Sean Penn (center) and Diego Luna (center right) star as real-life gay rights icon Harvey Milk and his lover Jack Lira respectively. 2 celebrating seattle’s gay community http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zp0uYT0zDbA http://cinema-holic.livejournal.com http://cinema-holic.livejournal.com
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