Spoiled Reviews

No Use Crying Over Spoilt Milk

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man ever to be elected to public office, and the first openly gay man to be gunned down in office. He was elected city supervisor of San Francisco in 1977. The story is the subject of Gus Van Sant’s Milk, one of the best films of this year.

Milk is played with revelatory depth and truth by Sean Penn, who is above all a physical actor. The things he is able to do with his body to evoke character are uncanny. As Harvey Milk, his shoulders slope, his hands flop at the wrist, and his voice lilts, all in a way that somehow both embraces and defies stereotype.

In our first shot of him, Milk sits at a table with notepad and microphone. He sighs, presses “record,” and announces that the tape is a record of his political and personal life, to be played in the event of his assassination.

He begins with his meeting of Scott Smith (James Franco) in the New York subway, and we get the first of the series of flash-backs (which eventually become flash-forwards) that are the film. Milk and Smith become lovers and move to the Castro Street area of San Francisco. They open a camera shop, but are quickly disillusioned with their bigoted reception by straight store-owners.

Milk longs to make Castro Street a haven for gays in San Francisco, and decides to run for office, which he does three times with slowly increasing success and hand-wringing. He enlists the help of friends, including Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch) and Anne Kronenberg (Alison Pill) and after local and national setbacks, is finally elected.

In office he meets Dan White (Josh Brolin), a fellow city supervisor with a family and an agenda. The two clash, but on a complex and deeply human level that transcends bigotry or righteous indignation. Brolin and writer Dustin Lance Black realize White with nuance and tenderness, where lesser filmmakers might have settled for nefarious mustache-twirling.

This is where the film truly transcends. People are people, it trumpets, no matter their sex or gender or beliefs or orientations, and neither Milk nor White are entirely good or bad; they’re just people. And so, for those of us who were only glancingly aware of the story of Harvey Milk, Dan White hardly seems a villain-to-be. Unfortunately he is, and when Milk repeatedly declines to back White’s agendas, an animosity grows.

[The spoilers come now, though this is a true story, so nothing is really revelatory.]

White resigns from his position, citing a salary too low to support his family, but within days asks to be reappointed. Mayor Moscone (Victor Garber) refuses, and White is thrown into turmoil. He climbs in the basement window of City Hall to avoid metal detectors, shoots the Mayor and then paces down the hallway, reloading his pistol. Milk is leaving his office, and White asks him for a few words. By now the audience is shouting at the screen—don’t go in there!—but it’s too late.

Van Sant shows remarkable restraint in the scene of Milk’s death. White lifts the pistol, Milk’s eyebrows shoot up, his hand shoots out, and there are two muted shots. Instead of going for melodrama, we instead get silent reflection—literally. There is no music, only the vision of Harvey Milk gazing out the window at the city he loves, reflected in the glass.

After the shooting, the city is stunned, and that night nearly 40,000 people gather in a candlelit march down Castro Street. The film’s structure saves it from the normal pitfalls of well-known non-fiction narratives. By leaving the end of Milk’s flash-forward tape-recording incomplete until after his death, there is an (ever-so-slight) measure of suspense in his death. He can’t die now, we assume; he hasn’t finished his tapes.

The film is both heartening and incredibly sad. Milk may have died, but in his wake rushed a flood of passionate civil-rights activists. If only Milk had come out before the passage of Proposition 8 in California, Harvey Milk might have once again made historic leaps in the name of human rights.

-Cecilia Razak