New York gay male with chutzpah takes on provincial backwater
Written: Jan 19 '09 (Updated Jan 19 '09)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Josh Broslin looks like Dan White; Sean Penn perfect Harvey Milk: loud, obnoxious
Cons: Very slight segment of a much bigger political story; very weak on Dan White's thinking.
The Bottom Line: See how gay liberation worked. Sean Penn is the perfect Harvey Milk, the gay lonely New Yorker intent on fame and glory in San Francisco, gets killed for his cause.
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| frwhiskey's Full Review: Milk |
BACKGROUND TO THE FILM:
Harvey Milk, a middle-class Jewish New Yorker of exceptional wit and intelligence, flounders abundantly in his adult life as a promiscuous gay, an undecided in any career path, and a narcissus lost and alone on his 40th birthday. The film begins in a New York city subway station, where he faces a night alone at 40. He picks up a young good-looking prospect on the stairs, takes him to bed, and they become good friends and lovers, sticking together on a long road trip to San Francisco.
There the two unemployed gay men head for the rundown working class neighborhood Eureka Valley, a few blocks up above the Civic Center. The Irish families of the area by the 1970's had been leaving for better homes, safer suburbs, and communities without forced school integration. The neglected old Victorians were cheap to rent or buy, so a steady trickle of gay males from all over the country were moving in, living cheap and having fun. Milk and his lover were able to pay rent and live the party life on unemployment checks, which shows us from the get-go how different the times were thirty years ago!
Some diehard Eureka Valley neighbors don't accept these two New Yorkers when they decide to open a camera shop. This decision by Milk stemmed from his receiving a botched processing job on his own photos. The two started raking in big profits by processing gay porno photos from these new transplant gay males. Milk's income was secure without his having to "work" all the time.
He became interested in gay male persecution on the streets, when gay men walked openly hand-in-hand. Both civilians and police could be a menace, especially if the gays in question were drunk or high and unable to fight back. Normally attacks on any males were much less prevalent than the attack on females, but gays while drunk/high? Common, easy targets, late at night, walking the streets.
Meanwhile, Harvey Milk is making friends at City Hall, becoming chums with Jim Jones of future Jonestown. Milk and George Moscone, who's running for mayor, enlist the help of the Jones' community, living in Western Addition, most of them of African descent. Hundreds are induced (read: slave labor) to campaign for Milk as supervisor and Moscone for mayor through Jones' threats and promises. As welfare recipients, most agreed. Milk and Moscone win; they now owe Jones. Plenty of SSI, disability and welfare checks from Jones' followers are filling political coffers, including Milk's.
Of large elephants in the room not to be discussed, the Moscone/Milk/Willie Brown/Jim Jones connections are the biggest here. Do your own internet research, and here's a start: http://www.whale.to/b/jonestown.1.html
In middle-class Excelsior District, southernmost part of San Francisco, homeowning Italian and other European immigrants are alarmed at the decline of law and order, of morals, and of general mayhem in the city. Their local native son, Dan White, only 34, former Vietnam Vet, fireman and policeman, runs for election for supervisor by promising to restore proper government. He wins the district election. Now he faces a City Hall Board of Supervisors leaning further and further left, fed by demands from the growing gay community, led by the snappy Harvey Milk.
913 San Francisco citizens, followers of Jim Jones, move to Guyana, and are forced to commit suicide in 1978. 276 were children. 80% were black. 90% were women. The adults were killed by needle injections to their necks; children drank poison-laced Kool-aid. The horror of such a story rocks the city and the nation, although Manson families had been on the loose throughout the 20th C., but Milk and Moscone, indebted to Jones, cannot condemn it.
Dan White finds himself out of his depth with the many transplants who now are running City Hall. It's not the city he knew and grew up in, and his feeling of outrage at the corruption he sees firsthand is further enflamed by stress at home: his wife, a teacher, becomes pregnant. Her salary as a teacher ends, and his as a supervisor is only $9600/year. They own a home at 150 Shawnee at San Jose Avenue. His large extended family cannot or will not help, and he feels more and more pressured when the child is born, although he's happy to be a father.
THE FILM
A director had a tough job before this film even began: how to find a fast-talking, sarcastic, convincingly gay and Jewish New Yorker type, who would please especially the gay audience the fim is aimed at? He looked around...and finally found... the man for you and me: SEAN PENN! (moustachio'd)
Harvey Milk, although pugnacious and obnoxious, was an effective politician. His wit could be nasty but it was clever and on point. No one could deny his ability to rally a crowd, use words to his own advantage. His popularity appealed to not only the gay male crowd, but also to lesbians, some minorities (esp. left-leaning blacks), and younger people like students. In the film, his personality, as acted by Sean Penn, is not whitewashed. That he could be very annoying and invasive is clear, but like many politicians, he was smart enough to take it so far, then crack a smile and a joke. Still, he stuck to his guns, and anyone will have admire that a man with an agenda, even straight from New York with nothing but an unemployment check, can with guts change an entire city's politics. His speeches were often inflamatory, yet never dull. His beatnik/hippy clothing evolved rapidly to the standard 1970's business suit when he saw how it would suit his aims. His hair became trimmed, moustache intact. Penn resembles the real Harvey Milk very much. Penn is himself half Irish, half Jewish, about 50.
Harvey Bernard Milk's narcissism continued in his personal love/lust life. At the time of his death, four of his lovers had commited suicide, and four were being juggled. He was a busy man not just at City Hall! All of his amazing energy on these two planes are well played by straight actor Sean Penn, right here on Castro Street, San Francisco. BTW, Castro is the new name for the district; old name Eureka Valley was discarded, just as now "Hayes Valley" is the new name for the old ghetto/slum area behind City Hall in the Western Addition near the housing projects. Sean Penn plays the gay sex roles chastely.
Josh Broslin is another fine choice physically playing Dan White. He's younger and better-looking than Milk, and his ethnic background is Irish. His Catholicism was weak, as was Milk's Judaism, but both had had religious upbringings. White's shorter education is not stressed, but he was very much an average student at Riordan H.S., more preoccupied with sports as a young man. Later, as a fireman, then a policeman, he earned a good salary, could marry and own a home in 1970's San Francisco. He knew the City inside out from his civilian work, and he knew the problems of law and order from the government side. He knew the citizens' concerns, and realized that the police could not fix everything: politics controlled the level of crime tolerance.
Hence White's decision to enter into local politics, a fatal mistake for himself and his family, his district and his city. Josh Broslin portrays a confused and uncertain city supervisor, with intimations of sexual confusion. Very likely it was quite the opposite, that Milk himself was attracted to White, perhaps made a pass, and when rejected, angered White and himself. Any young handsome fellow like White was definitely looked at by the gay males of San Francisco, while Milk had never had the looks, and at 45, was past the glow of youth, a fact he laments from the start of the film, for many gay males a tragedy, as for many straight women as well. Sean's promisicous appetite comes across as endearing, a funny handicapp interfering with his political life.
That the conflict between White and Milk was sexual is something the director would have been wise to omit, for it outshines the dire politic left-right issues fomenting in San Francisco. Many of us locals back in the 1970's were convinced that White was a hired assassin, perhaps by the CIA. Milk's premonition of his death, as shown by Sean Penn in this film, could have also been CIA-connected - via Jonestown.
The murder of Milk (and Mayor Moscone, but who cares?) in 1978 is the culmination of the film's two antagonisms. It threw Diane Feinstein into the driver's seat and changed the course of SF politics.
WHO WOULD BE INTERESTED IN THIS FILM?
1. Those who'd like to see 1970's street scenes, clothes, hair cuts, cars, and a lot of bellbottoms;
2. Those enamoured of San Francisco in any form;
3. Gays and those interested in the cause of gay freedom;
4. Anti-gay thinkers who'd like to see 30-year-old agitation techniques;
5. Jim Jones followers (few survivors);
6. Feinstein fans and haters.
THOSE BOUND TO BE DISAPPOINTED:
1. Males looking for gay porno scenes; it's chaste;
2. Political thinkers wondering what shifts changed San Francisco in those years;
3. Victims and survivors of Jim Jones' Holocaust wondering why their story is completely omitted;
4. Dan White family and friends who think of why there could have been righteous anger - it's not shown at all why White hated Milk, or if he did at all.
THIS IS A STRANGE REVIEW, I MUST SAY:
I saw this film when it first came out because I was a teenager working in the Main Library across from City Hall when the Mayor was shot. I distinctly remember that day, and how Milk's shooting seemed to most I met of little interest. It was the Mayor's death that mattered. This film just brushes past Mayor Moscone. Of course, it's a film about Milk, but really, at the time, it was mainly gays who cared about him, and they were and remain a small group even in SF.
Dan White lived several blocks from me; I went to school with his brother. The family was considered a solid and decent middle-class family. If Dan White was no scholar or high achiever, neither was Milk, yet the film implies that Milk was a great man??? while White was a poor low-down nobody. Wrong....Milk was considered a drifter, a loser and a troublemaker, the typical loud New Yorker who shouts & gets heard.
When you see this film, consider, if you come from a small well-run town, if such events had happened in your city. Would you consider loud and antagonistic transplants usurping your town's government a good thing? Would you find yourself itching to move if they took over and allowed crime rates to spiral?
That's what happened in reality. Come & see SF!
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
frwhiskey
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Location: San Francisco,CA
Reviews written: 173
Trusted by: 16 members
About Me:
Curmudgeonly yet whimsical, I'm a San Francisco tourguide full of vim and vinegar.
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