Director: Gus Van Sant
Year Released: 2008
Rating: 2.0
Standard biography of tragic gay-rights activist Harvey Milk (played by Sean Penn), his struggles running for public office and his eventual assassination (along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone) by disturbed city Supervisor Dan White - in terms of timing, it's bittersweet that this was released in the same year that Proposition 8 (banning the right of same-sex couples to wed) was passed in what's arguably the most liberal state in the U.S. While the well-known cast will certainly earn this a lot of mainstream attention, I'm afraid this can be placed in the Leftist Movies for Left-Minded People category, essentially chanting "Accept Us!" to a group of moviegoers who, more likely than not, are already open-minded: the Sarah Palins of the World aren't going to leave this in any different frame of mind (granted they watch the entire thing). While Penn offers a respectful rendering of Milk's flamboyance, it's Josh Brolin's Dan White figure that needed to be played with delicacy: instead of making him out to be some homophobic lunatic, he's made out to be a brooding neurotic. Part of that is the script, but a lot of it is Brolin himself, whose continued excellence reminds me of the kind of man's men - Gable, Hayden, Mitchum (to name but three) - that were so much a part of early Hollywood.
