Gus Van Sant (2008)

Harvey Milk was a seminal figure in the gay rights movement and the first openly gay candidate to be elected to public office in the state of California.  Less than a year after his election as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Milk was shot dead – with the Mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone – by another local politician, Dan White, who had been elected at the same time as Milk, on a right-wing, populist platform.     I saw Rob Epstein’s Oscar-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) in 2003.  Perhaps partly because that film familiarised me with the basic history of Milk’s political career (three unsuccessful campaigns before he was elected in 1977) and because Gus Van Sant and Dustin Lance Black, who wrote the screenplay, concentrate on what Milk did rather than looking beneath the exciting events the film relates, I found Milk thinly textured as drama.   Reviews that I’ve read which describe it as hagiography are right:  the filmmakers want to honour Harvey Milk as an historic figure in furthering a cause to which both Van Sant and Black are publicly committed.

It’s a legitimate treatment of the material – even if it limits the film as a drama – but there were moments, as the narrative moved closer to the killings, when I sensed a slight loss of nerve.  On what appears to be the eve of his death, Milk goes to a production of Tosca.  He sees Dan White’s face replace the face of a black-clad singer on the stage – a virtual premonition of his assassination.  Next day, as he falls dying from gunshot wounds, the last thing Milk appears to see from an office window in San Francisco City Hall is publicity for Tosca on the San Francisco Opera House.  This kind of patterning seems to come out of a different kind of film – a more conventional biopic.   In other respects, it’s arguable whether Milk can be described as a biopic at all.  We see nothing of Milk before the eve of his fortieth birthday, when he picks up a much younger man, Scott Smith, in a New York subway.  In bed with Scott later that night, Milk regrets the fact that, ‘I’m 40 and I’ve not done a thing I’m proud of’.   He decides to change his life (he works in insurance and is a more or less closeted gay) and moves to San Francisco with Scott, where they set up in a camera shop in The Castro, a developing gay neighbourhood in the city.   Van Sant and Black take Milk at his word – as if his first four decades were so much wasted time and his life began when he began to live an overtly gay existence; there are no flashbacks at all to an earlier time.  Shaped almost entirely in terms of the protagonist’s biography as a public figure, Milk, if it is a biopic, is a distinctive and invigorating one.

In most respects, Van Sant’s and Black’s approach works very well.   The reportage style meshes well with the library film that Van Sant uses extensively.  And perhaps because the script doesn’t delve into the motives or backstory of Harvey Milk and those close to him it helps to give the relatively few private moments a real intimacy.   Van Sant uses a tape-recording made by Milk, shortly before his death, as a framework for the narrative.  It’s not made clear in the film what exactly this recording is.  According to Wikipedia, it’s Milk’s will, recorded nine days before his death – but there seems to be a good deal of other, retrospective material in it too.  I’d be interested to know how much Black added to the transcript of the recording.  In any case, addition seems reasonable dramatic licence and this is an effective device:  Milk looks tired and is mostly unsmiling as he speaks into this particular microphone – a striking contrast to the energy and humour of the man that we see elsewhere.

Given the candidly parti pris perspective of the filmmakers, Milk isn’t crudely tendentious.  Of course Van Sant and Black want to present gay rights activism as starting from nothing and succeeding against the odds:  the opening credits appear against news archive footage of police raids on gay bars in the 1950s and 1960s and more coverage is given to the egregious opponents of the movement from the Christian conservative right – Anita Bryant (on news film) and the Californian Senator John Briggs (well played by Denis O’Hare), who sponsored the ‘Proposition 6’ initiative (to prevent gays or gay rights supporters from working in public schools) – than to the big name, mainstream political opponents of Proposition 6.  But Van Sant does at least show clips of President Carter and Governor (as he then was) Reagan publicly rejecting Proposition 6, the defeat of which was the culminating success of Harvey Milk’s political life.   (The passing of Proposition 8 in California in November 2008 – which has changed the state constitution so as to restrict the definition of marriage to opposite sex couples and eliminate same-sex couples’ right to marry – has given Milk a contemporary twist which its makers probably regret, except that it serves as a reminder that gay rights remain a work in progress, and at continuing risk of regress.)

I was excited when I learned that Sean Penn was going to play Harvey Milk because I thought he would be stretching himself.   When I read (in a Big Issue interview) that Gus Van Sant thinks it’s a pity he couldn’t get a publicly gay actor for the role, I part company with the director’s partisanship.  He can’t possibly, as an artist, regret the casting of Penn, who gives one of his finest performances – I think one of the best screen performances of recent years.  Off-screen, Penn has a reputation for political commitment that veers into humourless self-righteousness.  While I haven’t seen him let this feed through into his film characterisations, there’s occasionally been a pompous edge to his acting (especially in his ludicrously overpraised work in Mystic River – the only bad performance that I’ve seen from him).  Penn’s off-screen image also includes a macho element.  It’s possible – and a considerable irony, given Van Sant’s quoted remarks about having a non-gay play Harvey Milk – Penn’s own distance from Milk’s sexual identity is what kept him clear of political self-consciousness in the role, of evincing approval of Milk’s activism.   But that wouldn’t have been enough to ensure that Penn engaged with the role with deep empathy – and without a trace of condescension or self-distancing.  Which is what he does.  In that first encounter in the subway and the bedroom scene that follows, Penn conveys a yearning mischief and a capacity to give himself that’s edged by uncertainty.  These qualities never leave his portrait of Harvey Milk.  They’re there on or just below the surface of his public performances.  With a megaphone, Milk looks a more fully self-confident speaker; without it, his hand movements always seem to be preparing for a more expansive gesture than is actually delivered.  Penn expresses Milk’s humour with beautiful variety – in the smile lines that seem etched in his face, and in the gentlest inflections and throwaway lines as well as in the more obvious camp moments.   There are some gay men who appear to be completely masculine but seem to have a streak of effeminacy running through them which transforms their gestures, expressions and movements in a way that’s hard to define but impossible to miss.  Sean Penn gets this completely, it seems effortlessly.

The relationship between Harvey Milk and Scott Smith is not just one of the best-acted gay partnerships I’ve seen in a mainstream film but one of the most naturally and completely convincing descriptions of the trajectory of a love affair and friendship, gay or straight, I’ve seen in any biographical film.   It’s a familiar element of the biopic that the main subject of the story has a lover or friend who can go with them only part of the way then somehow gets left behind by the direction that the protagonist’s life is taking.  You could put the Harvey-Scott relationship into this category yet it comes across as original and individual.   There are no hyped-up I-can’t-take-it-any-more rows between the two men.  When Scott empties the apartment of co-workers and says to Harvey as they sit down to dinner, ‘If there’s one more word about politics …’, Harvey pauses, suppressing amusement, replies ‘This is the most delicious meal I have ever eaten’ and laughs in a way that makes you realise he’s then going to resume campaign talk (‘If we lose …’) and that Scott is going to capitulate.  What they see in each other – and that they like as well as love each other – is clear and credible.   When Scott leaves because he can’t take any more of Harvey’s unrelenting and extrovert commitment to the cause, it’s a gravely quiet scene.   When they meet at Harvey’s very public (last) birthday party, the bond between them is plain to see.  Penn and James Franco, who has a marvellous emotional transparency as Scott, convey this subtly and affectingly.

The relationship between Milk and the unstable Latino boy, Jack Lira, who moves in after Scott’s departure is less satisfying.  This is partly because of the predominating externality of the film – Jack is isolated from the political narrative – and partly because Diego Luna isn’t quite able to bring off the unself-conscious luminosity which seems to draw Harvey towards Jack.  Luna looks to be working to sustain the boy’s femininity and camp mannerisms – a criticism that can also be made of Emile Hirsch as Cleve Jones, the boyish hustler who becomes the chief inheritor, among the group depicted here, of Milk’s activist legacy.  Hirsch works hard but there’s a slight strain in the performance – as if he has to keep reminding himself that he’s playing a gay.  (Hirsch is nevertheless remarkably transformed from his lead role in Penn’s Into the Wild.  It’s not just that he’s virtually unrecognisable behind a large pair of spectacles; his whole body seems physically reshaped.)  Alison Pill is excellent as the sole female member of Milk’s team, Anne Kronenberg; she acts simply and eloquently – you get a strong sense of Anne’s blend of practicality and commitment, and of what it may have been like – as an alien in more ways than one – to become part of the group.

Josh Brolin gives another performance of real integrity as Dan White – not least in how he expresses White’s limited intelligence.  From the moment he appears, there’s something unaccountable about White; you can’t work out what’s going on behind his eyes and Brolin increasingly suggests that White can’t either.  He seems puzzled, mentally always one step behind; he speaks as if he knows what he needs to say but isn’t convinced by it.  A number of pieces about the film indicate there’s an implication that White was a repressed homosexual and/or that Harvey Milk believed him to be one.   The latter may be true but I think the script is honest in acknowledging the gay tendency to believe, if it suits, that anyone apparently straight might be gay (‘You just think he’s cute’, members of his team say to Harvey about White).  Dan White is repressing, or is unable to work out, something inside him but Brolin’s performance is too complex to leave you with the feeling that the something is purely or mainly sexual.  White seems to be drawn initially towards Harvey Milk because the latter seems different, clever – and friendly in a supportive sense.    I liked it too that we don’t see details of White’s domestic life that would inform us in an obvious way that the ‘real’ White was very different from his public persona.   Of course the filmmakers don’t want to show White in a good light – the infamous ‘Twinkie defense’ and the fact that White was convicted for manslaughter rather than murder still seem outrageous – but it might have helped for Black and Van Sant to explain the financial difficulties that contributed to White’s increasingly erratic behaviour on the Board of Supervisors.  (His salary in the job was a sizeable reduction from what he’d previously earned in the San Francisco police force and White, married and with a young family, was struggling vainly to make ends.)  But Josh Brolin’s sympathetic intelligence compensates for this omission in the script.   White’s defence’s claim of diminished responsibility may have been a sham but the diminished comprehension that Brolin gets across carries all the way through to the killings.  White seems to be watching himself shooting Moscone and Milk, unsure why he’s doing it.

A combination of Van Sant’s concentration on the detail of the political campaigns and the quality of the cast leaves you always wanting more of the characters.   (I especially would have liked to see Sean Penn do Harvey Milk’s metamorphosis from the nervy picker-up in the subway to his first, hippyish incarnation in The Castro but I came to accept that this was not how the film worked.)  Milk communicates a strong sense of the nervous excitement of being in at the start of a movement – and the gay banter is a real advantage in that it counteracts the political earnestness implicit in the material in a vivid, enjoyable way. This is one film where the closing legends summarising the afterlife of the people we’ve been watching are worthwhile – you really want to know what happened to them.  (Not least, it must be said, because the events in Milk occurred so little time before the wildfire spread of AIDS:  among the main characters, Scott Smith was the only one to die of an AIDS-related illness, in 1995.)   It’s also worthwhile putting on the screen pictures of each of the main actors, followed by a photograph of the actual man or woman they’ve been playing during the previous two hours (just over – but the time passes very quickly).  When we get a shot of Sean Penn, then one of the real Harvey Milk, the resonance between the two is almost audible.  Penn’s Milk always suggests a sense of surprise, of slightly apprehensive delight that, after living a life under siege for his first 40 years, he has a talent for performance and that he’s loved by his audience in the public world he’s come out into.   You’re reminded of this in the last shot of Penn then see it again in the face of Milk himself.  It’s a capper to what is a good film and a great piece of acting.

31 January 2009