Gus van Sant's Milk"" has once again brought moviegoers' attention towards that limited genre of the biopic. Critics love them (think of ""Ray"" and ""Monster""), but they're usually not the most exciting or innovative movies of the year. That's why one would be intrigued to see what Sant, who is known for his independent, more avant-garde work, would do with a biopic of a politician, of all people.
While Harvey Milk never made it past being a member of the San Francisco board of supervisors, he is known for being the first openly gay man in politics in America. After living in various cities around the States, he finally settled in a gay neighborhood in San Francisco, the Castro, where he began his career as a politician on a
soapbox, reaching out to ostracized homosexual youth.
Despite Sant's background, the director seemed intent to create interest in ""Milk"" not with clever or unique filmmaking, but by focusing on the real-life quirks and eccentricities of Milk and the Castro. Milk listens to opera and makes controversial, charismatic jokes to his audiences and co-workers. He ends up dating a desperately clingy Hispanic man who stumbles into his camera shop drunk one night. These whimsical unconventional aspects of Milk's character lend some humor to an individual whom is doomed from the beginning.
The bulk of the film, it should be noted, is dialogue. Dialogue between Milk (Sean Penn) and his lover (James Franco), between Milk and his political enemy Dan White (Josh Brolin), between Milk and his protégé (Emile Hirsch). And though, through stellar acting on the part of Penn and Brolin, the dialogue never quite sags, it doesn't build up quite the way it should either.
""Milk"" is at its best during moments of feverish intensity - rioting, White's act of defiance against Milk, even the sonorous passion of an opera singer. Unfortunately, such jolts of energy enter the movie rarely and late on, with a less-than-smooth transition from all the conversation.
And while ""Milk"" is certainly a good movie by all accounts - great acting, interesting plot - it never quite reaches a level of engagement beyond the solid biopic. It is moving at parts, but most of all when it shows, at the very end, the real footage of thousands marching after the assassination of Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. Brolin's gruff yet mentally fragile White adds a nice layer of complexity, and Penn is appropriately charismatic, but there isn't the heartbreaking apex one would expect.
Furthermore, the small things Sant does do to make ""Milk"" stylistically different from its counterparts, like the splitting up of a mass phoning operation into hundreds of little screens of people on the phone, aren't enough to make up for the hopelessly standard and mainstream character of the film, to the point where they almost come off as gimmicky.
The bittersweet story of Harvey Milk is as inspiring as it is mournful. It is about not only gay rights, but about the power of outcasts who organize together to demand respect. Unlike its subject, however, ""Milk"" is not different, and deserves no more respect and than its fellow Hollywood biopics.
Grade: B
