December 31, 2008: Milk
Milk is another biopic with serious Oscar potential, and while this is a genre which the Academy seems to love, I really have trouble investing myself in it. Having in recent years seen Ray, the film about Ray Charles, and Walk the Line, the film about Johnny Cash (which I sometimes refer to as “Ray 2”), I didn’t set myself up to expect much from Milk. Not that the story of Harvey Milk is in any way insignificant or boring, but these biopics seem to focus on manufactured melodrama and not go into a whole lot of depth about the actual people. Reading about this movie before I saw it made me want to see/revisit the 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk (I can’t recally whether I actually sat through this back in the 1980s or 1990s, or just saw snippets of it on TV several times).
What we’ve got here is Sean Penn portraying Harvey Milk, a San Francisco city councillor who was the first openly homosexual politician elected in the US back in the 1970s. He became a symbol for the gay rights movement, suffered a lot of pressure and backlash, and was murdered (along with the mayor) by a fellow councillor after less than a year in office.
This film was directed by Gus Van Sant, a director who has successfully walked the line between independent (Drugstore Cowboy, Elephant) and studio (Good Will Hunting, To Die For) films over the past 20+ years, depending on his goals. I tend to “like” his films, which is not to say that they are easy to take or necessarily designed to entertain in the traditional way, however, I don’t usually seek them out. Elephant and Paranoid Park are two of his recent works I intend to check out soon.
Milk is an intimate film in its visual style, with a certain urgency to it, which is totally appropriate and in that respect it’s very well done. Oscar nominations for Best Actor for Sean Penn and Best Supporting Actor for Josh Brolin (the murderous councillor) are supplemented by nominations for director Gus Van Sant, original screenplay, editing, costume design, and score by Danny Elfman (The Simpsons, Batman).
The publicity from this film arose in much the same way that it has in recent years for any film with high-profile straight actors playing gay characters (Sean Penn, James Franco and Emile Hirsch in this case), in much the same way that Brokeback Mountain did a few years ago. The timing was also perfect to piggyback on the outrage around the successful “Proposition 8” vote in California to ban gay marriage. As an openly gay director, one might presume that the story carries a personal angle for Van Sant as well.
So, I watched Milk, and it was fine, but I really don’t know whether or not it was a good use of my time. Watching the real documentary or reading a book about Harvey Milk would likely give me more information. I don’t know how biopics can rise above this dilemma and I certainly don’t think the format is necessarily unsuccessful. It’s not the kind of thing I want to go out of my way for, but as long as the Oscars have a love affair with this type of film, I guess I’ll have to keep seeing them.
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