The First Bullet (Milk)

I'm not a big fan of biopics. More often than not, I feel they are let down by a script's need to stick to chronology, truth and history. In such overrated films as La Vie en Rose or Walk The Line, many scenes feel burdened by the pull of biography, a magnetic force with which unimaginative screenwriters wrestle in vain: an interesting life does not necessarily make for an interesting narrative. 

Gus Van Sant's shown us with his poetic Kurt Cobain-inspired Last Days that he knows how to let the work emancipate itself from the conventions of biography. With Milk, the challenge was of a different order: making an awareness-raising political film reaching as wide an audience as possible meant the conventions of the biopic couldn't entirely be ignored. 

Enters relative newcomer Dustin Lance Black. Able to combine a deeply personal approach (that of a gay man raised in a conservative Mormon family) with a precocious understanding of the civil rights movement (he is not even 35 years old), Black's script is deceptively simple and propelled by political urgency.

Disguised as a biography of Harvey Milk - the first openly gay man to be voted into major public office in America - his screenplay is really an examination of the gay civil rights movement, a cultural and political transformation of which the City Supervisor is both the product and the catalyst.

Unlike many inspirational biopics, there's a lightness and a buoyancy here which carries the viewer through tumultuous times, as if caught up in a feverish march to City Hall. Resisting attempts to give the character depth in that all-too-American way - by resorting to simplistic psychological retro-clarification - Black lets Harvey himself tell the story, sat alone at the kitchen table speaking into a dictaphone, perhaps only days before his assassination.

Harvey's melancholy, world-wary tone contrasts sharply with the effusive, spirited 40 year-old we catch picking up a trick in the subway a decade earlier. Guiding us through the struggle for acceptance of a new generation of gay men and women who converged to 1970's San Francisco from around the country in the months following the Stonewall riots, Harvey is also telling us his story: how a closeted white-collar worker found inspiration in the working-class Castro district and became an outspoken agent for change.

The film charts the eight last years of Harvey's life. Inspired by the youthful optimism of his lover Scott Smith (James Franco), they relocate to San Francisco and open a small camera shop. Before long, Milk becomes known as the friendly neighbourhood problem-solver. In a fledgling gay community, at a time when men could go to jail for dancing with other men, Harvey becomes aware of the need for acceptance and equality. Along with a bunch of eccentric volunteer activists such as protégé Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsh), he begins to wade into the shark-infested waters of local politics, building alliances with unions, labourers, seniors and minorities.

As elected city supervisor, Harvey's courageous fights make him a lightning rod for political and personal attacks, from within the council, from the conservatives at large. Lobbying for an ordinance protecting people from being fired because of their orientation and fighting Proposition 6 - which sought to ban gay teachers, he exposed the bigotry and the hatred which drove so many young people to suicide.

When Proposition 6 is repealed, Harvey is shown a death threat just before the victory speech. It reads "you get the first bullet the moment you walk to the microphone". Harvey Milk may have died at the hands of the haters, but in firing the first bullet against his detractors, he left a legacy that would outlive him and still resonate loudly today.

Sean Penn's portrayal of Harvey Milk is so effortlessly good one forgets the actor entirely. There are no aspects of Harvey's complex personality which ring false: his rescue complex, his giddy enthusiasm, his gift of gab, his many contradictions. With the help of a prosthetic nose and teeth, contact lenses and a redesigned hairline, Penn literally becomes the character. And boy does he get Harvey's indomitable spirit and undefeated optimism just right. When chided, "you can't demand acceptance overnight!", it takes a pitch-perfect combination of the child and the man to make Harvey's answer, "why not?", sound exactly right.

It takes a great actor to play the lead in a biopic (one named after its subject no less), only to check his ego at the door, understanding that Harvey is just a prism through which to understand the gay rights struggle. As one character says in the film, Harvey wasn't the candidate: "the movement is the candidate".

Van Sant surrounds Penn with a superb ensemble cast of talented actors playing real people (many of whom are still alive today). Josh Brolin, for example, is utterly convincing as fellow supervisor Dan White, projecting the perfect, ambiguous mix of self-loathing, suave confidence and mental imbalance. The intelligent screenplay manages to fit Dan White into the story without giving away the true part he played in Harvey Milk's life and myth and Brolin does the role justice.

Also good are James Franco, who brings considerable depth of emotion to his role as Milk's lover, and Emile Hirsh as the young Cleve Jones (the real-life activist is also the film's historical consultant). The only false note comes from Diego Luna who overacts the part of Jack, Milk's lover in later years, unable to convince the audience that - rescue complex notwithstanding - someone like Harvey could fall for the limited charms of this whiny, temperamental and clearly unstable man.

The West Coast's cultural upheaval and burgeoning gay scene is brought vividly to life thanks to inspired production design. gorgeously grainy cinematography and Van Sant's eye for the iconic - think James Franco swimming naked in Advocate publisher David Goodstein's David Hockney-blue swimming pool. 

Visual symbolism is used with great subtlety, blending in nicely with the period detail such a project requires. Dan White's sexuality, for example, is called into question once by Harvey, with subtle visual clues, such as a rainbow of jellybeans on his desk, reinforcing that assessment later in the film. In another scene, a distraught Jack, now irrevocably removed from Harvey's political ambitions, drinks a bottle of Coors: the very brand that Harvey boycotts early in the film in protest of the brewer's discriminatory hiring practices.

Yet for all its technical, stylistic and acting excellence, Milk succeeds first and foremost because as an impassioned piece of political filmmaking, it is able to move and inspire in equal measure. There is very little use for cloying sentimentality when you are revealing the pain caused by so many years of oppression, degradation, discrimination and ignorance. Milk - both the man and the film - force the viewer to put themselves into the viewing equation. How does one fit in in the tragedy of homophobia and its opposite, the celebration of acceptance?

That I spent nearly half of the screening in tears surprised no one more than myself. Where were these tears coming from? As a gay man I conjured up the series of pent up humiliations, discreet outrages and uncelebrated triumphs stifled daily in a society which, while it may have come a long way since Stonewall, is still reluctant to distribute its rights and its freedoms impartially. In the darkness of the movie theatre I felt like a kid at Castro Camera, able to open the floodgates of feelings not expressed often enough, freely enough, strongly enough.

There's a beautiful scene in which Harvey offers an inspirational vision of happiness to a depressed teenager, one firmly anchored in the success of the gay rights movement: "you're going to meet the sexiest, funniest, brightest men, right until the end of your life, until you are never entirely sure which were your greatest loves and which were your greatest friends."

Gus Van Sant's masterful Milk is a testament to cinema's power to put us in front of our demons - and our collective achievements. In a time of change (I write this on the day of Obama's inauguration) and in a time of unresolved hang-ups (the film opened amidst the furor of California's Proposition 8), very few films have the power to bring viewers together without resorting solely to popcorn entertainment. Milk is a harrowing film, and because it is able to articulate a cautiously optimistic and politically viable definition of happiness, a superbly uplifting one. 

Milk is currently out in the US. It is out in the UK January 23rd and in Australia January 29th. 

The First Bullet (Milk)