Straight to DVD

Milk

Whitney and I are not huge fans of the biopic. Most of the genre, in our experience, fails to deviate significantly from two basic patterns. The first is what I call the Great Artist film (e.g., Walk the Line), which details said artist's journey from humble origins to fame and fortune, through some dark times that usually involve liquor and drugs and a failed marriage or two, and into a golden old age in which demons are mostly conquered and the world's love and respect are given and received graciously.

The other is the Martyr film (Gandhi), which tells the story of a great man or woman who gave his life for an important cause. Martyr films tend to have a little more potential, since they usually have major historical events to fall back on, plotwise, whereas Great Artist biopics have to force a whole life's events into an often contrived arc. (The very best biopics tend to be ones that break both these molds—think Lawrence of Arabia—but they're few and far between.)

Milk, is, of course, about San Francisco's Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the U.S., who was assassinated in 1978. (I'm not spoiling anything here—the film begins with historical footage of the news of Milk's and Mayor George Moscone's murders). As such, it's definitely a Martyr film, so given the excellent word of mouth on the film—often including such phrases as "even though it's a biopic"—and on Sean Penn's lead performance in particular, it made our queue fairly easily.

And it's true: Milk really is better than most biopics, with director Gus Van Sant keeping the pacing fast and the tone as light as possible. The establishing scenes, of Milk's migration from New York City to San Francisco and his conversion from buttoned-up, closeted businessman to camera-store-owning hippie in the Castro, are especially good: Van Sant brings to life the mid-'70s San Francisco gay scene and the burgeoning civil-rights movement that was part of it. In doing so, he gives us simply a good story, rather than a Lesson about a Great Man. (Penn and James Franco, who plays Scott Smith, the lover who first loosens Harvey up, deserve credit here as well—in just a few scenes, they set up their characters' relationship with such depth that you understand its importance to Milk later in the film.)

As Milk enters politics, of course—first losing several campaigns, then finally winning—a certain weightiness becomes inevitable; after all, these really were, and are, important events, or we wouldn't be watching a movie about them. But even here Van Sant and Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black are smart: They speed up the pace of the film and cling tenaciously to the happy-go-lucky aspect of Milk's character, and thereby avoid some of the Martyr-film tropes for a surprisingly long time.

In any biopic, though, these well-known themes inevitably surface at some point. Sometimes Black's attempts to subvert one of them just collapses into another: A subplot involving Milk's second live-in lover, Jack Lira (a fascinating Diego Luna)—an unbalanced young man Harvey tries to save but fails, partially because his political life leaves him with less and less time for him—is meant to undercut the Martyr's saintliness a bit. But strain on the Martyr's family life is yet another predictable plot point in these types of movies. (Not only that, but despite the fact that the Lira storyline is in fact true to life, it nonetheless feels a bit forced, as if it had been created to give Milk a flaw or two.)

Then, too, the movie's treatment of Milk's murderer, fellow city supervisor Dan White (Josh Brolin, in yet another excellent performance), is a bit heavy with foreshadowing. It's not so much the implication that White is a massively repressed gay man himself that's the problem here—as speculative as that choice may be, Brolin is subtle enough about it to make it work. It's more the weight the film takes on whenever White appears. Maybe that's inevitable, given that we're watching the relationship between a man and his eventual killer, but Black and Van Sant avoid the obvious path in so many other ways that it's mildly disappointing to see them sticking to it here.

Really, though, these are minor quibbles, and in each case an absolutely stunning performance or two makes the problem nearly invisible anyway. Everyone is great in this movie, from the aforementioned Brolin, Luna, and Franco to Emile Hirsch as activist Cleve Jones to Penn himself, who is transformational as usual in his Oscar-winning role. In fact, he's able to accomplish by himself many of the things Black and Van Sant are working so hard at in the script. In a scene in which Milk reverses himself on an implied political deal with White, Penn gives our hero a smug, self-satisfied demeanor that for an instant makes us sympathize with his adversary. It's just enough to show that this man did have negative aspects to his personality—and then it's gone, and we're back in his corner. But it's touches like that from writer, director, and especially actor that keep Harvey Milk human throughout. They also make Milk one of the most thoughtful and, yes, one of the best biopics we've seen in a long, long time.