Milk is an essentially successful biopic, but I have to qualify that by saying that I am getting a little tired of seeing biopics in general. I am reminded of the works of Orson Welles, which seem devoted to the idea that we can never really know anyone. A human life is so multifaceted that even the major achievements in someone life can't really be portrayed accurately in a movie.
Yes, I know the counterargument with regard to Milk: the movie only recounts the last eight years of the life of the gay rights activists, from 1970 to his assassination in 1978, but even then the scope is too broad. Perhaps if it had narrowed its to only focus on his actions once he was elected to the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco in 1977, where he managed to lead a campaign to fight against an anti-gay ballot proposition, which made the statement that, yes, the was someplace in the world where it was not okay to discriminate against gays.
But Milk opens as its protagonist (Sean Penn) as he moves from New York City to San Francisco with his partner Scott Smith (James Franco) in the early 70's. The pair start a camera store and at first desire to only function as businessmen, but Harvey is outraged when a gay man is murdered and the police hardly even bother to look for the killer. He decides to enter politics and runs three losing campaigns in row until he is finally elected, becoming probably the first open homosexual the country to win public office.
The movie is best when it focuses on the incredible and ridiculous lobbied against homosexuals that Milk and his supporters had to fight and uphill battle against. As a heterosexual, it's hard for me to understand what it must be like to be gay, but watching this movie and the number of people who call gays deviants and pedophiles, among other things, was intense, which showed the movie was succeeding.
Where the film fails is in its attempts to show Milk's personal life, which is so often tied to the classic biopic cliché: "Honey, please put down the work and come to bed." Milk breaks up with Smith and starts a new relationship with Jack Lira (Diego Luna), but both characters are ludicrously underwritten. There is a key scene late in the film between Milk and Lira that should be of crucial importance, but it comes out of nowhere and then is forgotten, creating a gaping hole in the film.
I am sure that Sean Penn will get an Oscar nomination for his role, and he is already receiving huge amounts of critical praise, but I don't think the performance is that good. For one thing, he doesn't look or sound much like the real Milk. For another (and more importantly) he doesn't seem to embody the essence of the person, in the same way, say George C. Scott, Sir Ben Kingsley, and Denzel Washington did Patton, Gahndi and Malcolm X, respectively. We are too self concionscess of his tricks and makeup to totally buy him as Milk, but his performance is passable, but nothing extraordinary. I have a feeling that the awards are going to ignore the real standout performance in the film - Emile Hirsch as Cleve Jones, a young man protégé of Milk who went on to found the AIDS quilt.
Yes, Milk has some moving moments, but it works best as a film of political and social advocacy and not one of screen biography. It's a good movie, but if you really want to learn about Milk, you're better off reading a biography.