Milk - Movie Review and Synopsis

After moving to San Francisco, the middle-aged New Yorker, Harvey Milk, became a Gay Rights activist and city politician. On his third attempt, he was elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in 1977, making him the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the USA. The following year, both he and the city’s mayor, George Moscone, were shot to death by former city supervisor, Dan White, who blamed his former colleagues for denying White’s attempt to rescind his resignation from the board.

Mr. Milk had been the subject of several books and the Academy Award-winning documentary feature, The Times of Harvey Milk (1984); but Milk (2008) is the first fictional feature to explore private aspects of the man’s personal life and career.

Milk was filmed on location in San Francisco. Many of Mr Milk’s real-life surviving friends and former associates participated in the making of this film, several appearing on camera.

While millions of Californians are reeling from Proposition 8’s passage, Gus van Sant turns the clock back 30 years, to a golden moment in San Francisco that, though it soon turned to rust, provided a singular voice for the city’s gay and lesbian population (perhaps something that was missing for Prop 8). I am fortunate enough to live in said city, and it was striking to see what the Milk crew did with their big budget (well, big for a GVS production) in order to return the Castro to its 70s-era splendor; Milk’s camera store was recreated, the Castro Theater got a hot makeover, classic cars jammed the streets, there were parades, and Sean Penn could be seen traipsing around the Haight, looking foxy in a kimono. (At least I think that was him.) While the film received its fair share of attention toward the end of the summer — James Franco, who plays Milk’s lover, seemed to enjoy throwing a kink in Pineapple Express press junkets by describing what it was like to kiss Sean Penn — we already know that distributor Focus Features (still smarting from Brokeback?) has an Oscar campaign waiting in the wings. Will Josh Brolin, who here plays city-supervisor-turned-assassin Dan White, receive a nomination for this role, or for W., or both?

Rated R for language, some sexual content and brief violence.

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