I didn't. I saw 'Milk' Tuesday, after the Academy rewarded the idea of the film a number of Oscars. They like to do that: make statements to the world of what they think is important through nominations and awards rather than the movies or actors that are the best in any given year. Think Crash, Million Dollar Baby, Dances with Wolves, or my particular favorite, Ordinary People. Or this year the crime against humanity that Tropic Thunder and The Dark Knight were not even nominated in a major category. Or, several years ago, that Team America was not nominated or awarded the Best Puppet Movie Oscar!
I know, I know, there is no Best Puppet Movie award. But, exceptional movies demand exceptional allowances.
Instead, our noses were rubbed in the Academy's infatuation with geek roles or roles that allow major actors to play against type. Especially if the 'type' is in their emotional wheelhouse or is 'brave' in exposing some archetype of the moment. See Denzel Washington in Training Day playing the corrupt cop we know is the norm, or Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, hitting the low notes doing what Ben Stiller satirized as not going "full retard" for the trophy. The Academy voters love cloying and it works for actors as well: does the name Roberto Benigni cause you to wince?
On IMDB I counted six of the last twenty best actor Oscars going to actors allowed to go over the top by playing a variety of these Academy loved roles. Maybe seven, depending on your level of cynicism.
Curiously, such roles are not written for actresses. With, perhaps, Charlize Theron in Monster as the exception, the Oscars for Best Actress went for exceptional acting in cause-less characters.
The cause is the movie in Milk. And, those emotionally affected by the cause or the idea of the cause are its most ardent admirers. What I saw was a variation on a Medieval Morality Play. Those traveling troupes of actors going from village to village acting out the familiar parables of the Bible to villagers who knew the stories and were waiting for the emotional release of being able cheer the good guys, hiss the bad guys, and weep at the pathos.
It is the product of the fervid imagination of a screenwriter working out his own story on the big screen with an occasional hat tip to actual history. His acceptance speech after winning the Best Screenplay Oscar tells you all you need to know about what the movie is really all about. I admire him. It could not have been easy to survive being gay in a Mormon family. But, it isn't easy writing a coherent script that rises above a series of straw men and straw situations (hey, I invented a term) to interest those who want to see a movie appealing enough to understand what it might have been like to be Harvey Milk, or Mayor Moscone, or even Dan White.
What we see on the screen in Milk are straw men erected and blown down, over and over again. Set pieces, carefully crafted into a celluloid hagiography. Anita Bryant made foolish, how hard is that? Religious beliefs made risible by the screenwriter's script ... certainly groundbreaking stuff there. Harvey Milk, deified. Well, a couple of glossed over imperfections: bad hair, white socks, an inability to sustain relationships.
Dan White, a repressed Roman Catholic, ex-cop, ex-fireman, ex-construction worker, ex-Indian Chief (just kidding, that's the Village People) with smoldering eyes that in every scene are telling Harvey to kiss me, kiss me you fool, and take me away out of the closet so I don't have to shoot you in the end to make me the Twinkie Killer.
What we see on the screen is convenient to the screenwriter's list of how to make his movie and his life sympathetic. At strategic points he exchanges the bludgeon of his righteousness with the rapier of a jackhammer. A call out of the blue from a suicidal wheelchair-bound gay teen phoning Harvey to tell him of his (the screenwriter's?) awful parents and his desire to commit suicide forthwith. Some plot device, huh, in a biopic? Just to get you cold unemotionally involved villagers back into the morality play. Or, miraculously, the same teen, saved by the bus trip to LA Harvey recommended, calling Harvey to tell him that the movie's McGuffin (Prop 6, or was that a stand in for Prop 8) was defeated?
Zounds, I like to be manipulated by a screenplay as much as the next guy but repressed suicidal teens driven by their parents to end it all, and in wheelchairs, saved by Sean Penn?
Oh, and, at the moment of Harvey Milk's near triumph, his current partner committing suicide, leaving not one note, but notes-a-palooza. Festooned from hall to bathroom. All complaining about Harvey's commitment to politics and his life's work rather than to getting home on time. In this movie, for the first time ever, heterosexual men playing the homosexual partner of the main character, forced by this Oscar winning screenwriter into the demeaning traditional stay at home wife role pleading for attention or they will leave.
In Milk, on the one hand just leaving. On the other, really leaving.
I did a quick Wikipedia on Harvey Milk the real man and his real life and neither a James Franco nor a dead lover hanging in the bathroom to be found.
It might be that fans of Milk will not universally praise this review. Why? I know not. It's a movie not a morality play. It was meant to depict human beings not stereotypes. Yet the characters seldom even rise to stereotype but exist only as symbols. Sean Penn, asked to do little other than what Ben Stiller satirized in Tropic Thunder, awarded an Oscar by an Academy, which loves symbols more than acting or actors. Did any Milk fans think for one moment: Harvey Milk, rather than that's Sean Penn playing Harvey Milk? It would be like claiming you saw Ethan Edwards not John Wayne.
The Harvey Milk behind Milk is ill served. He is probably a much more interesting man inhabiting a much more interesting time than is revealed by the Oscar winning screenwriter, the Oscar nominated director, or the actor who won an Oscar for best example of what the Academy thought we should be watching rather than The Dark Knight.
I sat in the darkness of the theater and thought: at best, the 2% variety, not the whole Milk.
Wikipedia!
Milk's lover Scott Smith most certainly existed, whether he looks like James Franco is something else. Jack Lira (played by Diego Luna) was also a real person who committed suicide in the *exact* way the film depicts. Notes and all.
Read Randy Shilts' 1982 book "The Mayor of Castro Street" and see the 1984 documentary "The Times of Harvey Milk" instead of looking to Wikipedia.
QUOTE: "A call out of the blue from a suicidal wheelchair-bound gay teen phoning Harvey to tell him of his (the screenwriter's?) awful parents and his desire to commit suicide forthwith."
This was not a screenwriting device. The story of the wheelchair-bound teen, with a *name* is told in Shilts' excellently researched book. It's truth.
I certainly can't argue with your theory that Hollywood loves a good message film, but in my opinion you've picked the wrong movie to build your argument around.
Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black did not make up scenarios you see in "Milk" from whole cloth. If you read Shilts' book in particular, you will see just how excellently Black captured the essence of Harvey Milk's life.
You will also see that many of the comments you made in this blog are quite ignorant and have nothing to do with documented facts.
How Black structured his script is absolutely design of imagination. The events Jones refers to were not events D.L. Black just 'created.'
I stated that if Jones wants to find veracity of what is in the film, he can look to two sources that are not Wikipedia. I stand by my comment.
Yes I can honestly say I was so wrapped up in this peformance of MILK - so full of life, so happy, so full or energy. The next time i saw the intense, glowering, serious PENN in an interview I couldn't believe they were the same person. I was jolted back to "oh yes that's Sean Penn - not Harvey"
An Incredible performance - one that will stand the test of time and deserved the Oscar.
Is there any movie about which this can be honestly said? I though Penn's performance was amazing, and I can't imagine anyone doing Milk better. I also thought Josh Brolin was spectacular and nuanced as always.
Maybe I'm just happy that mainstream movies that are in-your-face about the subject of homosexuality are becoming more prominent. But I thought Penn deserved his Oscar.