The time is right for Milk. Gus Van Sant’s cinematic consideration of the man who
arguably did more than anyone to raise this country’s gay consciousness arrives
at a crucial time. What a cruel
joke that in the space of a month, our democracy managed to bestow the highest
office in the land on a black man—and have one of its states, California, turn
back the cause of human rights via its insidious Proposition 8, one that
rendered a gay citizen’s right to marry null and void.
Like history repeating: it was only
back in 1978 that in the same state, Harvey Milk mobilized an army of sick and
tired men and women to successfully beat back a religion-fueled hate mandate
called Prop 6, one that would strip gay teachers of their jobs and rain similar
persecutions on their supporters.
That’s right, a witch-hunt, based on the same small-minded notions that
stoke the flames of the Right today.
That great humanist Van Sant begins
his film with the activist telling his tale into a tape recorder, but unlike
Beckett’s Krapp, Milk wants to get down the particulars in anticipation of life
foreshortened, not one long-lived.
From there we see an unlikely man transform himself into someone whose
work forever changed the conversation about gay rights before his assassination
at the hands of the pathetic, possibly homophobic, Dan White.
Kudos to Sean Penn (transformed,
revealed as Milk), James Franco, Emile Hirsch, Alison Pill, Josh Brolin and
Diego Luna, actors who bring anger, great passion and soul to a tale that
obviously can’ t be told enough in a country that’s forgotten its most basic
founding principle: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all
men. They and California’s recent
reversals remind us that in this country no one has the luxury of complacency. I and my spouse left the screening
pondering one question: where is our generation’s Harvey Milk? Love you Barack, but there’s no
refuting it: we could use another hero.