Published: January 06, 2009 10:32 am      

Milk

Focus Features’ new film “Milk” chronicles Harvey Milk’s life from his work as a struggling businessman in San Francisco’s predominately Irish working class neighborhood of Castro to his time as a city supervisor.

Milk’s star was bound to burn out, and apparently he knew it.

Shortly before his death, the activist who greeted crowds with, “Hey, I’m Harvey Milk and I’m here to recruit you,” sat down at his kitchen table with a tape recorder and microphone and recounted the highs and lows of the controversial final years of his life.

Milk is a retelling of Milk’s narrative which opens to black and white footage of police officers dragging homosexual men out of gay bars and placing them inside vans.

The climate in the early 1970s — even in notoriously liberal California — was radically anti-gay at a time when Americans were still getting used to the term.

Milk stepped into a world in which his neighbors didn’t want him, his tireless friends adored him and the rest of the world didn’t know quite how to take him.

Milk is played by a surprisingly low-key Sean Penn whose New York accent is dead-on and whose affectations are similar to those seen in interviews with the real Harvey Milk who was shot dead on Nov. 27, 1978 by supervisor Dan White along with San Francisco Mayor George Mascone.

Early in the film, Milk meets Mississippi pretty boy Scott played by James Franco who turns out to be Milk’s dear friend and one of his loyalist supporters.

Initial scenes of Penn and Franco kissing may be disturbing to some. However, the film has been wiped of all but the most fleeting hints of sensuality.

Issues of sexuality and gender were not on Milk’s original agenda. His experiences seemed to make him what he becomes.

The movie shows him being rebuffed by potential neighbors — a fellow businessman refuses to shake hands with him — and trading barbs with various people until he decides to become something of a crusader for gay rights.

Penn is a likable Milk, whose good humor and decency are tempered by his quest to make things better for all disenfranchised people.

It’s the desire to succeed that eventually does Milk in.

He drives away his lover Franco with his decisions to run again and again for public office and surrounds himself with a bevy of “beautiful,” talented young men and smart, openly-gay female strategist Anne Kronenson played by Alison Pill.

Pill’s sweet-looking face apparently hides a lion-hearted determination to help her often-beleaguered boss. In one scene, she manages to get the San Francisco Chronicle to endorse Milk.

According to the film, Milk was plagued by death threats and even kept an anonymous, pin and ink drawing of himself being tortured to death on his refrigerator, telling Franco he didn’t want to hide the hateful note where it could become an insidious source of terror. He wanted it out in the open.

“We’ll see it every day. It’s not as scary there,” he says.

Josh Brolin is more scatter-brained than scary as assassin Dan White who would later use the so-called “Twinkie Defense.”

I liked Milk and his advisors — all of whom bring a different perspective to the movie.

Emilie Hirsch is wonderful as smart, disillusioned young man Klive Jones who comes into the fold after a fierce debate on with Milk on a city street and a disastrous trip to Europe.

Even in death, Milk isn’t a tragic figure.

He’s just a busy guy who loves opera and happened to have a lot to say at a time when many people wanted to homosexuals to just be quiet. He tells everyone who is gay to come out to their co-workers, their families and their friends.

Early on, Milk says he always judged his audience before introducing himself.

If the audience wasn’t gay-friendly, he’d tell a joke, making himself the punchline, saying something about “forgetting” his high heels.

He was never above laughing at himself.

After his death, Milk’s supporters are said to have sent his ashes drifting into the Pacific Ocean mixed with clouds of bubble bath and grape Kool-Aid.



3 and 1/2 stars out of 5.