Milk
Harvey Milk is the gay community's Martin Luther King: an openly gay politician who agitated for equal civil rights and encouraged homosexuals to abandon the closet. He was gunned down in 1978 by a disgruntled fellow San Francisco city supervisor, Dan White.
Gus Van Sant's simultaneously intimate and sweeping biopic incorporates real archival footage: the opening sequence showing arrests at '60s gay bars is especially powerful. But it's equally about a more carefree time in gay culture: sex and love aren't furtive or desperately meaningful, Brokeback-style, but playful and affectionate... and nobody yet has AIDS.
Milk covers Harvey's final eight years, from closeted 40-year-old to martyr. James Franco and Josh Brolin aresure footed as Harvey's lover Scott and the enigmatic White, but as Harvey, Sean Penn is a revelation. He breathes such wit and exuberance into this character that you completely forget he can glower for America.
Van Sant, too, retreats from his trademark inscrutable romanticism. There are lyrical moments - close-ups of Harvey and Scott gazing into each other's eyes; a tortured White naked under a window -but this is storytelling as inexorable as the change Harvey demanded.
By Mel Campbell
Format: Cinema
Genre: Other
Keywords: Harvey Milk, Gus Van Sant, Gay/Lesbian
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