Gus Van Sant’s best-known films (which are not the same as his best films) have historically involved a certain grappling with What Hollywood Does. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, platitude-spouting Robin Williams. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, laughable slang-spouting Sean Connery. Hollywood flatters its flavors of the month by shoe-horning them into paint-by-numbers remakes of aged cinematic game changers. Etc. Anyone cognizant of Van Sant’s turn-of-the-century Hollywood period shouldn’t be surprised by his willing ability to play it straight.
To say that Van Sant continues to “play it straight” with Milk isn’t meant as a pun regarding sexuality, exactly, but said pun wouldn’t be entirely off the mark. If his Hollywood trilogy was what Van Sant needed to get from his early meditations on the emotional lives of low-lifes to his much-vaunted Death Trilogy, then that most recent career phase may be what Van Sant needed to work through in order to merge the first two modes of his career. Milk takes the defining moments of a subculture once perceived by the mainstream as deviant, and runs it through the mill of What Hollywood Does, thereby sanitizing its hero for feel-good mainstream martyrhood. Van Sant’s laundering of an outsider hero through the very inside mechanism of the Hollywood biopic has been variously described as heroic and distasteful. As of press time, I think it’s somewhere in between.
If you’ve seen the superior documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, you know the story: in his early 40s, a newly-out Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) moved from the East Coast to San Francisco and opened up a camera shop on Castro Street, in what would grow to become the mecca of gay San Francisco. In the early 70s, though, the gay community was still subject to the bigotry (and physical intimidation and attacks) of some straight neighbors and virtually all of the SFPD. As an activist fighting for better treatment of his community, Harvey Milk actively reached out to other groups–blacks, Hispanics, even Teamsters–to form coalitions against the powers that were. After losing a number of local elections but gaining in popularity and notoriety with each one, Milk won a seat on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors alongside future senator Diane Feinstein, and Dan White, a conservative former firefighter from a neighboring Irish-Catholic district. After a serious of personal and political conflicts with Milk, White submitted his resignation to the Board, and then showed up at City Hall the next day and shot Milk and mayor George Moscone. White’s lawyer successfully argued that his client had been mentally incapacitated at the time of the killings due to an unusual consumption of sugar the previous evening.
As in Good Will Hunting, here Van Sant does find a few spots to wedge in the haunting, contemplative beauty that governs his best films, but evocative imagery is not Milk’s primary concern. Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black mold Milk out of historical fact and on the frame of disappointingly conventional biopic tropes, including an unnecessary and somewhat illogical framing device and a heavy dependence on thematic foreshadowing.
Surprisingly, some of these tropes are employed with such grandness that they could potentially be read as something a step above Biopic 101; they could almost be read as clear-eyed camp. For instance, though Van Sant never gets into the alleged Twinkie binge nor White’s trial for Milk’s assassination and the riots that ensued, he does show Milk and lovers and friends bonding over sugary treats at several key points in the narrative, most notably in a birthday cake-in-bed scene after the (unseen) first coupling of Milk and his long-time lover Scott (a brooding, James Franco — so humorless as to be unrecognizable as an Apatow Player). At some level, this functions as not-so-veiled comment on the merit of the so-called “Twinkie Defense“; on the other, there’s something so incredibly heavy-handed about the image of Harvey Milk with whipped cream on his nose joking that he won’t live to the age of 50. It’s almost something out of Hold Me While I’m Naked-era George Kuchar — a dip into What Hollywood Does that somehow seems to simultaneously swipe at it.
But not all of Milk’s nods to Hollywood expectations are as stylized; in fact, in its dealing with Milk’s own sexuality, the film is frustratingly restrained. Penn, though exemplary when embodying Milk in political mode (the film’s various scenes of rallies, protests and vigils are as rousing as this sort of thing gets), often comes off as cartoonish when the topic of sex comes up. Black’s script reduces its protagonist to a doddering, even stodgy old man in the midst of the 70s bacchanal. Often seen doting on young proteges but rarely flirting, when Milk does take lovers, their presence in the film is so awkwardly shoehorned in that when one of the live-in variety is disposed of suddenly, the hyper-speed with which Milk moves on seems so troublingly unrealistic that one wonders why the character was ever introduced in the first place. For a film about the fight for the right to sexual freedom, Milk is shockingly sexless.
As baked into the script, this makes a certain kind of sense. Penn’s Milk encourages gays and lesbians all across the state to come out of the closet, based on the rationale that if bigots knew they were trying to restrict the rights of friendly, harmless faces in the community, said bigots would feel bad and back down. But Milk himself is concerned with managing an image of gayness in his personal life that’s based on reminding the straight world of his identity solely through words (no movie character has ever verbally announced his sexual preference so many times in a single film), and not appearance or actions. Just as he, after a powerful gay publishing tycoon warned that he was “too old to be a hippie,” traded in his faded denim twin sets and ragged pony tail for a three-piece suit and clean shave, Milk warns his boyfriends and friends to stay out of bathhouses and to not use canvassing as an excuse for cruising. The character doesn’t see the irony in this — for him, it’s simply an effort to make sure their movement maintains credibility as a serious struggle for civil and human rights and is not reduced by outsiders to a fight for the right to get laid — but as a mirror to Milk’s mainstream ambitions, that irony is unavoidable. It’s a film about the politics of sex, in which the political process itself not only takes precedence over but seems to stand in for the complexities of real life sexuality.
There’s an argument to be made that this is the only way to make a film about this man, set in that place and time, that could be palatable to a mainstream audience, to the point where maybe it could even make a point about a certain present-day political fight better than any number of ill-conceived boycotts. I’m not sure I buy that argument, although if in the end the film’s accidental timing helps to speed along the current fight for equal rights, that’s a good thing. But if such real-world issues weren’t on the table –– if the film wasn’t being asked to do triple-duty as biopic, Oscar contender and teaching tool –– I wonder: if it was going to require such homogenization, is the life and death of Harvey Milk something that should have been tailored for mainstream consumption in the first place?
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth