Milk
dir. Gus van Sant
2008

"Everyone likes to make themselves out to be something more than they are, especially in the homosexual underworld."
- Willie O'Keefe, JFK

"I just want to be loved. Is that so wrong?"
- Jon Lovitz as Harvey Fierstein, Saturday Night Live

"Go ahead, shoot. The best thing about being me is...there are so many mes."
- Agent Smith, The Matrix: Reloaded

There were about thousand ways to screw up Milk, and Gus Van Sant managed to avoid all of them.

A contentious social issue, a flamboyant spokesperson, a brooding enemy, a public tragedy at the dawn of a horrific disease epidemic and a nationwide struggle for civil rights. These are all the fixings for a boilerplate tragic-hero melodrama (see: Valkyrie.)

In films like Drugstore Cowboy, Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, we see a mainstream director with a penchant for human subtlety and deliberate plotting.

And then there's Psycho, Last Days and Elephant: films that were just slightly less than accessible.

In Milk, Van Sant synthesizes these earlier works beautifully.

Like Drugstore Cowboy, Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, Milk is a human story that relies on strong performances and an essential confidence that appealing characters are more interesting when presented as-is, warts-and-all. Most especially if they show us the warts themselves.

Like Drugstore Cowboy, it is narrated from the point of view of a social leader whose own personal life is harder for him to manage than the missions he sets himself on.

Like Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, Milk is about imperfect, defensive people trying to reach across social and political lines to find common ground with the imperfect, defensive people on the other side.

Like Psycho, Milk is a meticulous recreation of a piece of history.

Like Elephant, Milk highlights the work-a-day banality and quiet but stultifying alienation the precedes violence, putting a lie to the sensationalistic "trenchcoat mafia" mentality that dominates the media presentation of these events.

Like Last Days, Milk is expressionistic, with lived-in interiors and characters separated by chipped walls and scuffed floors representing the long occupied closets in their heads.

Enough cannot be said of Sean Penn's performance, so I won't even try to be adequate. He inhabits Harvey Milk so thoroughly and genuinely that it's not in the slightest bit jarring to see him juxtaposed against found footage from the era.

Josh Brolin, also, deserves a good deal of praise. He inhabits the film like Grendel: a dark, brooding force lurking behind the scenes. He's not in nearly as much of the film as Penn. He isn't even introduced until at least 30 minutes in and very little of his life or back story is depicted.

That's no serious objection. The film is called Milk, not White.

But it does leave him at a significant disadvantage. Like Ginger Rogers, who had to do everything Fred Astaire did only backwards and in high heels, Brolin has to deliver a truth just as central to the story as Penn's by remaining largely silent, by watching his words, by censoring himself. And all while swimming against the sympathetic tide.

The difficulty of this wasn't lost on Van Sant. At a point in the film where Milk's friends question his persistent efforts to befriend and reach out to White, Milk answers that he knows the kind of closet White is living in. He's felt that pain and alienation in his own life and his struggle would be meaningless if he abandoned White to his inner demons.

The tragedy of Milk lies as much in the understanding that hatred is its own punishment as it does in the acceptance that justice does not guarantee happiness.

Van Sant, sitting at the back of our school cafeteria of state, quietly sketcthing images of Kurt Cobain and the Columbine killers, has delivered quite a portrait.

Four stars. Jason Milk says, I'm here to recruit you.