Gus Van Sant is a very wayward filmmaker, whose most characteristic subject in
art house films like Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991)
is the young underclass male, viewed with a sympathy unpredictably streaked
with desire. Similar figures appear in later films such as Good Will Hunting
(1997) and Finding Forrester (2000), but with the prurience tidied away and
a rather pious compensating emphasis on access to education. He handled
uplifting bilge of this subtype with neutral competence, seeming to keep his
auteur self under lock and key. In fact, his new film Milk, from a
screenplay by Dustin Lance Black, is as close as he has come to a mainstream
film with art house values. This account of the life of the San Francisco
gay politician Harvey Milk, murdered in 1978, may not technically be Van
Sant’s first bio-pic (Last Days, released in 2005, was a sort of elegy for
Kurt Cobain) but it’s a strong contribution to the genre.
There is nothing here about the hero’s early life or early adulthood. This
life really does begin at forty, or at least on Milk’s last day of being
thirty-nine, when he cheekily picks up young Scott Smith (James Franco) on
the New York subway, despite a gap of image as well as age – Harvey very
much the discreet businessman, Scott glowing with hippy freedoms. The two of
them form a surprisingly resilient partnership, and move to San Francisco,
specifically the newly gay-friendly area of the Castro, where Milk opens a
camera shop. It turns out the police aren’t part of the welcoming element in
the area, preferring to raid gay bars and assault their patrons rather than
protect them as the flow of tax dollars would seem to indicate they should.
Little by little Milk becomes a protester, then a spokesman, and then a
possible candidate for the post of supervisor.
Like Van Sant himself, Harvey Milk was both a maverick and a willing
compromiser. In one charged scene in the film, Milk remakes himself as a
plausible clean-shaven candidate in a suit. Gone are the beard, the
ponytail, the check shirts, the jeans and work boots. In fact he’s
reclaiming the costume of his closeted New York days with a new purpose.
This is the root paradox of politics: to represent your people you have to
stop being one of them.
It’s clear that the screenwriter sees Milk as a hero, but he has also recorded
interviews with witnesses surviving from those times (including Cleve Jones,
a young man politicized by Milk, played in the film by Emile Hirsch), so
there is an unusual concentration on political detail. It took a number of
campaigns to get Milk elected, and brute luck played a part, when districts
were redrawn so that the Castro and the Haight – the gays and the hippies –
formed a new administrative unit.
There’s been some debate about just how pro-gay Sean Penn, who plays the lead,
actually is. Does it matter? I think I’d rather an actor played the part
because its vitality is a gift and a treat to a performer than as some sort
of statement of solidarity. Harvey Milk had a private life almost as busy as
his public one – he was closer to being a committoholic than a
committophobe, taking up with the highly unstable Jack, played in the film
by Diego Luna, when the priorities of campaigning eroded his relationship
with Scott.
Harvey Milk cooked, he made jokes, he flirted, he had the courage to debate
with his opponents on their home ground. When he received an obscene death
threat, he decided the best way to neutralize it was to stick it on his
fridge in plain view. Camp for him was a tactic and not a fate. He used it
to introduce a note of unease into formal situations, and to test people in
the new circles he moved in, to see how they coped.
He saw politics as a form of theatre. How his style developed is shown by two
episodes of gay protest. In the first, Milk asks for police permission to
march (when asked “Where?”, he answers “Anywhere”) so as to channel outrage
into the purposeful movement which will take the edge off it. A riot is
averted, and Milk has also shown the authorities that he can marshal his
constituency. When there is rage on the streets again, with local
anti-discrimination laws being repealed across the country in the heyday of
Anita Bryant’s influence, events as they unfold, though still rapid, are
definitely being stage-managed. Milk (by now an elected supervisor) passes
Cleve his loudspeaker and tells him to lead a march on City Hall. He himself
gets a high-speed lift to the building on Scott’s motorbike, so that he can
emerge providentially and discharge the tension he has inflamed.
There’s a nice bit of patterning in the film, though, which shows Cleve Jones
being radicalized while Milk himself becomes more mainstream. When Jones
first appears, he is working as a hustler, and laughs off any question of a
wider gay identity. Harvey Milk beckons him near, and he trots down the
street (a characteristically steep San Francisco street) with an exaggerated
floppy coltishness, seeing his own every move through a potential customer’s
eyes. Then as Harvey Milk becomes more of a commodity, Cleve Jones becomes
less of one.
The film treats Milk’s killer, Dan White (who first shot the city’s mayor,
George Moscone), even-handedly, if a little oddly, editing out the strongest
arguments both for and against him. On screen, White’s obsession with money
just seems small-minded, as it is bound to if you don’t know that he had to
leave the Fire Department, a better-paid job, when he was elected to the
Board of Supervisors, and also that the restaurant business he ran was in
trouble.
Milk himself was deep in debt when he died, which casts a shadow on the idea
that he would have gone on to great things if he had survived – there is
nothing so easily manipulated as a broke politician. As for the case against
White (Josh Brolin), nothing is said about his reloading the gun between the
two killings, something which made his successful claim of diminished
responsibility due to eating too much junk food (the infamous “Twinkie
defence”) transparently false, as well as insulting and grotesque.
The visual style of the film is restrained, more intimate than epic, making
very effective use of archive footage, but also indulging in exquisite
flourishes. When Milk wins the election at last, the punched-out chads from
the voting papers fall briefly over the image as confetti. A more stylized
and protracted touch is to shoot almost a whole scene reflected in the metal
surface of a whistle lying on the ground. It takes the eye a little while to
locate the reflected figures, and though the whistle is relevant (unable to
trust the police, gay men under threat would whistle for community
assistance), it’s doubtful whether the device pays its way. This perhaps
represents the Hitchcock-worshipping side of the director who made the
notorious shot-for-shot remake of Psycho in 1998, and here paying homage to,
say, the murder in Strangers on a Train filmed through the victim’s dropped
glasses – except that Hitchcock’s scene was intensely dynamic, drawing the
audience into the twisted excitement of the killer, while the scene in Milk
is really only dialogue being gussied up.
Sometimes it’s a matter of the editing indulging the hero when more scrutiny
would be rewarding. At one point a teenager calls Harvey Milk from Minnesota
(having seen him on television and found his name in the San Francisco phone
book), desperately alone in a hostile family. Milk tells him he has the
power to make a new life – “Just get on a bus”. Then the young man says “I
can’t walk”, and we see his wheelchair. Pathos and poignancy – but if the
editing didn’t synchronize our realization of disability with Milk’s, and
had shown us the wheelchair earlier, then we would be confronted, not with
the heart-wrenching unfairness of life, but with the idea that slogans can
only get you so far.
The dubious touches multiply towards the end of the film. Lance Black’s script
has some tendentious moments, but that’s almost its job. Just before he is
killed, Milk is told by Scott (with the authority of someone who is now
friend rather than lover) that he is proud of him. Since Scott Smith died in
1995, long before Black started his researching, this seems to be pure
invention. Then, in the middle of the murder, Milk is granted a moment of
stillness and contemplation. Being shot to death isn’t likely to be an
introspective experience, but it is a genre requirement that the hero
inhabit the moment of his death – the genre here being not bio-pic but
hagiography. Between the bullet impacts of his martyrdom, Milk gazes at the
city’s opera house, where he saw Tosca so recently. It becomes clear that if
politics is theatre, then it may turn out to be tragic theatre.
We have already watched a scene set in 1970 in which the thirty-nine-year-old
Harvey Milk couldn’t imagine reaching fifty. Since then there has already
been a reference to that idea (with Scott saying, looks like you’ll make it
to fifty after all). Do we really need the 1970 scene replayed in full? It
hardly counts as irony if it has IRONY written all over it in fifty-foot
capitals.
But it’s the soundtrack that is the greatest and growing let-down of the film.
Gus Van Sant has worked with Danny Elfman before, on To Die For and Good
Will Hunting, but those were very calculated mainstream entertainments. I
start from two assumptions. One is that the worst single thing that ever
happened to film as an art form was the invention of the CD. In the 1980s,
Original Soundtracks became more and more crucial to the promotion of films
– and soon a CD could contain almost as much music as the running time of
the average feature. It followed that films were soon awash with music, and
directors would always go for more rather than less. What harm could it do?
Well, it could accustom audiences to receiving the most drearily obvious
emotional cues from the soundtrack, rendering all the subtlety of the tenth
art (as the French stubbornly call it) redundant.
The second assumption is that Gus Van Sant has the best pair of ears in
American cinema. Anyone who has seen Elephant (with sound designed by Leslie
Shatz) knows that he can work wonders without conventional music cues, with
textures and atmospheres that hover between sound and silence. The idea that
Elfman’s musical wheedling has anything comparable to offer is laughable.
On the day of the murders, Harvey Milk’s supporters at first thought that
there was going to be no public response. They were expecting a riot and not
what they got, a dignified march by candlelight. Silence instead of
shouting, sorrow rather than anger – what would Leslie Shatz have been able
to do with that? Particularly as the candlelight march became the defining
ritual of the AIDS years, in which Milk might or might not have played a
part. Instead of lovingly textured silence, Elfman offers the usual dilution
of Copland and Barber, shallowly resonant Americana, affirmation with a tear
in its eye. It’s a mystery that a film director as subtle as Gus Van Sant
should make way, at this crucial point, for a composer who thinks he’s doing
us a favour by telling us exactly what to feel.
MILK
Various cinemas
Adam Mars-Jones’s books include Lantern Lecture, 1981, winner of the
Somerset Maugham Award in 1982, and Hypo Vanilla, 2007. His most recent
novel, Pilcrow, was published last year.
