Milk

(Movie Review)

As a history geek, and as someone who gets more of his history from movies than I would like to admit, I really enjoy watching biopics. However they can start to all seem the same after a while.

I'm not sure if this is because all life stories naturally share similar elements, or if it is a result of Hollywood's one-size fits all approach to screen writing.

But there were certainly a lot of elements in this story that I felt like I had seen all before.

The protagonist is roused out of his blissful existence when he becomes awakened to a huge injustice. He rallies others to the cause, and goes from being a complete novice to the most unlikeliest of leaders. However as his dedication to the cause grows, his personal relationships begin to suffer, and at some point he's forced to make a choice between his dedication to his wife(/boyfriend) and his work.

[Although to be fair, the ending of this movie is anything but routine. Public officials getting assassinated is nothing new, but when one public official is assassinated by another public official, who also assassinates the mayor, and then gets let off in court because he had been eating too many twinkie....well, that's just something you don't see in the papers everyday.]

There are however, a couple redeeming features which makes this film rise above the usual biopic fair.

One is the incredible acting job everyone does. Sean Penn is amazing in this role (to the point that you almost forget he's a normal straight man in real life). James Franco does an excellent job. Emile Hirsch, who I had never even heard of before I saw this movie, is great as Cleve Jones.

And Josh Brolin is just an awesome character actor. He's so completely different in every movie I've - seen - him - in, I didn't even know it was him until the ending credits.

And well the over-arching story can seem a bit cliche, the execution of it is very well done. The scenes are set up in a way that keeps the story moving quickly, and the dialogue is snappy.
The movie does lose some points with me for the overly drawn out, melodramatic death scene at the end. But generally speaking very well-paced.

And finally, a word about what is probably the biggest point of this movie: it's topical nature.
We've all seen lots of historical movies about racial discrimination. And when we watch these movies, we often think to ourselves, "how could people be so prejudiced/ignorant/hateful back then?"

Because this movie is more topical, we don't need to ask those questions. Instead when we see the scenes of discrimination of prejudice in this movie, what first pops into the mind is, "I know people just like that."

The issue with proposition 8 out in California last year sparked a lot of parallels to what was going on in the film.

Proposition was about marriage equality, whereas in the film homosexuals were fighting to just keep their jobs--indicating we have made some incremental progress since the 70s. But one often gets the sense we aren't too far from reverting back to where we started. (There are a number of people in mainstream political parties who would love to roll back the clock on this.)

On a personal level, having grown up in a conservative area of the country, I could tell you lots of these views I've heard first hand. And I'm sure you could too.

To me though, the really amazing thing about both proposition 8 (W), and the Proposition 6 -the Briggs Initiative (W), is that the religious right was actively organizing to take someone else's rights away. I can't understand what would motivate people to band together and do that. One would think that the natural response would be, "It's no skin off my back if gays have equal rights. Sure, why not, go ahead. At any rate, I'm much to lazy to organize and do something about an issue that doesn't affect me at all." (At least that would be how I would react.)

The film doesn't really answer these questions. But it does at least try and expose the ignorance and bigotry of the people behind it.

Update: Loius CK on gay people on youtube--thought this illustrates the point nicely.
and this one too.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein Respond to Obamas First State of the Union

Milk: Movie Review (Scripted)