QUEERMONTON Got Milk? Dec. 10 2008

I watched Milk, a Gus Van Sant-directed biopic about the late, great Harvey Milk, with a sense of ownership. I had come across Milk’s name a few years ago and my curiosity compelled me to order Randy Silt’s biography of Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street. I devoured it within a month and soon found myself following Internet rumours that Milk’s life was being made into a film. Years later, sitting in the theatre, I knew the film was going to be good, but I needed it be really good.

The film begins with 1950’s archival footage of men being arrested, suspected of being gay. Many of the men raise their handcuffed arms to cover their faces. Others stare into the camera; their beings, their cluelessness, bravery or brazenness penetrate through the years. Technology and the screen meet the audience head on—projected four stories in front of you, their small act of defiance from decades ago of not being afraid or ashamed has ensured that in some way they have survived.

The film ends with a cinematic recreation of the 30 000-person candlelight vigil that encompassed Market Street in San Francisco on the night of Harvey Milk’s assassination, led by Cleve Jones (played in the film by Emile Hirsh).

If the title sequence of the gay men in the 1950s is meant to convey what life was like before Milk, the final scenes seem intended as a sad wink to what was next for the gay men of San Francisco throughout the 1980s, ‘90s and today. While Milk was not alive to see the devastation that AIDS would inflict on his beloved community, his work did leave a framework, a community and people in power who would address HIV/AIDS.

In between the bookended scenes is eight years in the life of Harvey Milk, from schelpy New York businessman to becoming a San Francisco city supervisor, in doing so becoming the first openly gay man to win a major political office in the history of the United States.

Played by Sean Penn—a role rumoured at different times to have been offered to Robin Williams, Richard Gere and James Woods—Milk comes alive in all his gayness, nelliness, charisma and improbable leardershipness. Appropriately missing from the discourse around the performance of Penn and others is the rhetoric that came up with Brokeback Mountain around the need for openly gay actors to play gay roles. This argument is in part neutralized by the acting strength flexed by Penn, Hirsh and others.

Another is the fact that Van Sant is a strong and subtle director who knows when to let the camera linger, hover, move in closer and pull away. In the first scene between Milk and his reluctant lover (played by Franco), Van Sant’s direction and Penn’s unabashed commitment to be queeny, needy and full of comely desire bring you fully into Milk’s world and from there on in, even in the face of Milk’s great achievements, Franco always feels like the man that got away.

Van Sant, a well-established yet indie favourite, also knows how to assemble the working best around him. The lighting in the film is superb—a scene near the end of the film catches one of Milk’s tear-filled eyes on the day he is to die, gleaming saintly against the depths of encroaching dark blue and black even though we know it is morning.

The music in the film, by well-known composer and frequent Van Sant-collaborator Danny Elfman, relays the overarching theme of the movie, hope, even though we all know the sad ending to Milk’s life. Soaring strings and angelic voices punctuate the everyday yet ultimately historic actions of a man gone too soon.

Milk’s writer and soon-to-be writing superstar Dustin Lance Black wrote the Milk screenplay without any producer’s backing or promises. Black’s outness, comfort with gay as a topic and writing talent come out through his script.

Timeless as the story of hope is, the story of Harvey Milk also is now timely. Milk’s story finally arrives to movie theatres across North America mere months after president-elect Obama gave millions of Americans a reason to hope, and in the shadow of Prop 8 in California and similar propositions in other states that will see rights taken away or not granted to people based on their sexual orientation.

Sitting in the theatre, watching the film with some of my friends, the feeling of ownership I walked into the theatre with gave way to communal giving. As far as we are from San Francisco and as many generations which have passed since Harvey Milk’s victories, we are all inheritors of his legacy and the hope he generated.

I don’t know if the film is perfect but I do know that Milk’s story—which includes those who came before him that shaped him and those who followed who were shaped by him—is ours as much as it’s his, and the film is a way we can share our stories with everyone.