Milk
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Sean Penn is no sweetheart. As an actor, he goes farther and deeper than any American performer of his generation in his meticulous depictions of flawed, unlikable, and dark-souled men. His three films as writer and director are portraits of obsessive self-destruction. And as one of Hollywood's most peculiar political journalists, he feels no compunction shilling for such worthies as Saddam Hussein and Hugo Chávez, perhaps because he has spent so much time humanizing monsters on the big screen that he feels compelled to do the same for real-life monsters.
Who could have known that inside Penn's breast secretly beats the heart of a politically correct sentimentalist? His performance as Harvey Milk, the 1970s gay rights advocate who was murdered by a political rival inside San Francisco's City Hall, is an unblemished portrait of a martyred saint. For much of the movie, Penn wears a beatific smile that is so warm, kind, and unshadowed that he is almost unrecognizable. This is the kind of transformation that separates genuinely great actors from their peers, and Penn is nothing if not a genuinely great actor. He takes the
Harvey Milk that was conjured up by tyro screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and lets that Harvey Milk take him over.
The thing is, the Harvey Milk of Milk is not the real Harvey Milk, and Milk the movie is a sham. The movie turns an incendiary, mau-mauing, take-no-prisoners radical of the 1970s into an ingenuous teddy bear. In the telling of
the late gay journalist Randy Shilts-whose biography, The Mayor of Castro Street, is the unofficial inspiration for the movie--the real Milk was a smart, aggressive, purposefully offensive, press-savvy attention hound who believed the cause of gay rights would be advanced if there were riots in the streets of San Francisco. He was always on the hunt for a casus belli. By contrast, the cinematic Milk convinces the San Francisco police to let him organize an impromptu march to prevent a riot.
The real Milk was a sexual liberationist of a very specific 1970s type. "As homosexuals, we can't depend on the heterosexual model," Shilts quotes him as saying to one boyfriend in San Francisco by way of explaining why he had another boyfriend in Los Angeles. "We grow up with the heterosexual model, but we don't have to follow it. We should be developing our own lifestyle. There's no reason you can't love more than one person at a time." Shilts adds: "That ultimately was what his politics were all about, Harvey decided."
Milk was murdered three years before researchers identified the AIDS virus, which was the horrifying natural refutation of his doctrine (and which took the life of Scott Smith, the man with whom Milk moved to San Francisco from New York in 1970). It is understandable that screenwriter Black and director Gus Van Sant do not want to muddy their iconographic portrait with the inconvenient truth about Milk's polyamorous views or behavior. They no longer represent the vanguard of the effort to expand gay rights, which is now focused almost solely on the institution of marriage. But it is a distortion, and a significant one.
|
