Milk

On Wednesday, instead of the usual ritual viewing of Heroes and TUF on Charlie’s DVR, Kristin and Charlie and I went to Gus Van Sant’s new biographical movie about Harvey Milk.

Milk was SO GOOD. It was really interesting and compassionate and beautiful. The acting was good, and that seems to be what everyone is talking about, but what I really liked about it was the way the story was constructed. I mean, there are TONS of historical documents about these events (and a lot of the people involved are still around and aware of the movie). The movie uses the historical record – lots of old footage, including this amazingly moving scene of the candle light vigil after Harvey Milk died – but it totally avoids feeling like a documentary. There’s tons of framing: stories inside of stories, levels of narration, and distortions – I lost count of how many times what we’re watching is not the action but a reflection of the action, in a window or a mirror or a TV screen or even in an extreme close-up of one of the whistles gay men used to carry in the Castro in case they were attacked. I am pretty sure several of these shots didn’t even make sense physically, and it was these odd angles and unlikely perspectives that for me made Milk less a movie about a life than a movie about how hard it is to make a movie about a life.

It had a lot of the SUPER cheesy stuff that usually makes me indifferent to these big Oscary biopics, but it justified even those moments somehow, in part because of the constant assertion of credibility* and in part because of the corniness of Harvey Milk himself - without unfailing and doomed optimism, he would not have been the hero he was.

*One of the corniest scenes in the movie is when, in the final moments of Milk’s life,he stares out the window at the Tosca posters across the street. Well, it turns out there's a lot of good reason to believe that he was actually staring out the window at the opera house when he died.