Milk (15.)
Directed by Gus Van Sant.
Starring Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Emile Hirsh, James Franco, Diego Luna, Alice Pill. 128 mins.
Hollywood seems to have been planning a film on Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the US, more or less ever since a bullet struck him down in his office. At various times Oliver Stone and Robin Williams have been attached and I think we can count ourselves lucky that it has eventually rolled through to Van Sant and Penn to do the duties.
Van Sant’s career has mostly divided up between cold, austere art films and sentimental commercial projects but Milk exists somewhere between the two. Van Sant can be dispassionate about stuff like high school massacres and suicides and though Milk is filled with joy and despair, tears and laughter it’s a comparatively coldblooded beast compared to the standard Oscar Pleader.
It’s not a thrilling boundary pushing piece like Elephant or Paranoid Park but the film’s grainy images capture that specific 70s, feel perfectly, probably even better than Zodiac did and with much less effort, and Dustin Lance Black's script is strong on the politics of how minority groups impose themselves on the mainstream.
It has a clear view of who the good guys are but isn’t too sanctimonious. It has a couple of caricature old style Republican hate figures for audiences to jeer at, but the treatment of day to day council opponent Dan White (Brolin, fantastic again) is equable. You can see in some way that Milk played a part in shaping his assassin.
If the film can’t shake my prejudice against biopic, it may have shaken my prejudice against Penn who in the last year has directed a truly great movie Into the Wild, been president of a Cannes jury that actually picked a deserving winner and has now turned in a stellar turn in the title role. Getting Penn to play a political activist martyr is hardly a stretch but this is one of those rare occasions when he forsakes strutting for acting. With Penn it is all in the hair, the worst the hair the better the performance and this is his worse hairdo since Carlito’s Way.
Directed by Gus Van Sant.
Starring Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Emile Hirsh, James Franco, Diego Luna, Alice Pill. 128 mins.
Hollywood seems to have been planning a film on Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the US, more or less ever since a bullet struck him down in his office. At various times Oliver Stone and Robin Williams have been attached and I think we can count ourselves lucky that it has eventually rolled through to Van Sant and Penn to do the duties.
Van Sant’s career has mostly divided up between cold, austere art films and sentimental commercial projects but Milk exists somewhere between the two. Van Sant can be dispassionate about stuff like high school massacres and suicides and though Milk is filled with joy and despair, tears and laughter it’s a comparatively coldblooded beast compared to the standard Oscar Pleader.
It’s not a thrilling boundary pushing piece like Elephant or Paranoid Park but the film’s grainy images capture that specific 70s, feel perfectly, probably even better than Zodiac did and with much less effort, and Dustin Lance Black's script is strong on the politics of how minority groups impose themselves on the mainstream.
It has a clear view of who the good guys are but isn’t too sanctimonious. It has a couple of caricature old style Republican hate figures for audiences to jeer at, but the treatment of day to day council opponent Dan White (Brolin, fantastic again) is equable. You can see in some way that Milk played a part in shaping his assassin.
If the film can’t shake my prejudice against biopic, it may have shaken my prejudice against Penn who in the last year has directed a truly great movie Into the Wild, been president of a Cannes jury that actually picked a deserving winner and has now turned in a stellar turn in the title role. Getting Penn to play a political activist martyr is hardly a stretch but this is one of those rare occasions when he forsakes strutting for acting. With Penn it is all in the hair, the worst the hair the better the performance and this is his worse hairdo since Carlito’s Way.
