A Pink Paladin

Sean Penn in Milk

In 1898, in a letter to an English sympathizer written from his exile in Paris, a disgraced Oscar Wilde wrote of the largely secret struggle against homosexual persecution: “I have no doubt that we will win, but the road is long and red with monstrous martyrdoms.”

Wilde, of course, was already one of those martyrs. Eighty years later, Harvey Milk became another when Dan White, a fellow member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, shot Milk and Mayor George Moscone to death in the horrible climax to a political dispute.

Milk had only been elected the previous year, but he was already the most prominent admitted gay occupant of public office in the country, and something of a political phenom. He had helped spearhead a campaign to defeat state senator John Brigg’s referendum that would have prevented any “open” gay person from teaching in any California public school. And he had managed to get the Board of Supervisors to pass a gay-inclusive anti-discrimination ordinance by a 6-1 vote (with only the traditionalist conservative White in opposition).

Gus Van Sant’s vivid, very entertaining, and deeply sympathetic motion picture biography relates the story of Milk’s political career, covering the last eight years of his life. Van Sant’s own career as a director is one of the oddest in the American film industry. Since Drugstore Cowboy brought him to industry attention twenty years ago, he has punctuated his list of small, “personal” films that are not solidly story-bound with a couple of big, mainstream-oriented projects, in particular Good Will Hunting (1997). Four years ago, he made the self-regarding, almost solipsistically inaccessible Elephant, a fictionalized examination of a Columbine-like massacre that contained one of the more curious and obnoxious scenes in recent years. Before they go off to wreak horror and death, the two youthful male protagonists kiss unexpectedly, as if their mutual attraction was somehow implicated in the pending carnage.

But with Milk Van Sant has more than atoned for that lapse. He reportedly spent more than a decade trying to get the project started. The result is large-hearted, deeply felt but carefully shaped. It’s about a brief, truncated public life that made a demonstrable difference in the lives of millions, gay, straight, or otherwise.

Van Sant and scripter Dustin Lance Black have also tried to take some measure of the less public man and their efforts are often shrewd and insightful, if not always entirely consonant with the record. Milk opens with scene-invoking old news footage and headlines (“Police start crackdown on homosexual bars”). In a mildly awkward framing device, the film has Harvey (Sean Penn) reading his own story into a recording machine at the kitchen table. It picks this up on the eve of his 40th birthday as he encounters Scott (James Franco), a butchly pretty young semi-hippie, in a New York subway station. Harvey manages to sweet-talk the reluctant young man into his apartment and bed, while still coming across as shyly lacking in ego. It’s typical of his skills. Soon, he has thrown off his life as a Manhattan business executive and taken off with Scott for San Francisco, where they open a camera shop in the Castro.

When Harvey meets with homophobic rebuffs from other small business types, he organizes gay residents, moves on to help the Teamsters mount a boycott of the union-busting Coors beer company, and leads resistance to the police department’s ill treatment of gays. Angrily repulsed by the street murder of gay gardener Robert Hillsborough and police indifference, he decides to run for a seat on the city’s Board of Supervisors, with Scott’s help. He loses handily, but does bring out a new young gay vote, and after three more attempts—including an ill-advised run for the California Assembly against future mayor Art Agnos—succeeds in 1977. As the film understands, in large measure he owed this final success to the city’s adoption of a district representative system in place of city-wide seats. All of this is recounted in a smoothly informative and engaging fashion.

Milk benefits immeasurably from another of Penn’s remarkable, emotionally persuasive and nuanced performances. Harvey’s ingratiating, soft-pedaled charm, craftily deployed against both friend and foe, is consistently captured by Penn, who still effectively portrays the public dynamism that Milk was famously capable of as he rallied people of disparate situations under his umbrella program. His was old-fashioned, if markedly progressive urban retail politics. He made appeals to hard-pressed public transportation users, labor union members, small business operators, gay youth and middle class good-government citizens.

Penn is masterful, but Milk also relies on a range of admirable performances: Franco’s calmly competent but increasingly weary-from-politics Scott; Diego Luna as the very young, emotionally frail boyfriend whom Harvey takes in when Scott finally decamps; Josh Brolin’s sharply accomplished but subtle rendering of White as a limited man crucially losing his bearings. (An incidental failure is the impression the film may leave that females didn’t play a significant part in Milk’s movement.)

Historian John Longhery has noted what an unlikely California gay politico Milk was: a Republican from New York who shied from gay activists as too threatening. But he and others have also taken account of Milk’s sometimes fierce ambition and usually repressed temper that occasionally erupted. Van Sant and company certainly suggest some of the craft behind their subject’s appealing persona, but they don’t address it frontally. (In his political campaigns, Milk recreated himself somewhat, falsely claiming, for example, that he had been kicked out of the US Navy because of his homosexuality.) The film wants to concentrate on distilling from the story the hope and inspiration that Milk himself promoted and generated.

The movie ends on a note of reconciliation and muted optimism, as it depicts the tens of thousands of San Franciscans who marched mournfully through the city after Milk and Moscone’s assassinations. It skips past the White Nights riots six months later when a jury let White off lightly.

Milk’s legacy is real, but not as unidimensional as the film implies. It avoids the ensuing AIDS crisis, and the political backlash against the movement’s assertion of its rights. In 1980 city voters scrapped the district-voting system that was partly responsible for Milk’s election.

Milk opts for consolation and hope and draws a reassuring line of transcendence from the earlier era to the present.