A Filmmaker's Review: "Milk" (2008)

"Milk" (2008) is a film starring Sean Penn as the forward-thinking progressive and incredible activist and member of the public office, Harvey Milk - the first openly gay man to have a job in public office. Josh Brolin portrayed the famous Dan White who eventually assassinate Harvey Milk. Emile Hirsch portrays the AIDS activist Cleve Jones. The film's storyline is actually surprisingly close to what actually happened and the acting is surprisingly very good (since I am not the biggest fan of Sean Penn).

The film's storyline includes not the entirety of Harvey Milk's life but instead the time leading up to his campaign and then the time until his death. He states in the midst of the film that he will not live to see fifty, which is something to pay attention to because it is true - Harvey Milk is killed before he is fifty years' old after being shot and assassinated by Dan White who then goes on to kill himself. The final scene re-enacts the vigil that was held for Harvey Milk in San Francisco after his funeral where thousands and thousands of people walked the streets with candles.

The acting was actually pretty great, as I have already said. I think that there was really no better person to portray Harvey Milk than Sean Penn. There was a lot of clarity in his acting, but there was also a sense of surrealism - it made him look both larger than life and also like the humble average man who wanted to make a change in the world. Sean Penn's portrayal of Harvey Milk, the audience can see, was also based within interviews of the man - it is clear to me that Sean Penn studied the mannerisms, the voice and the lifestyle of Harvey Milk before portraying him in order to play the person in the most accurate way possible for the medium he was presenting.

I believe that the character of Dan White suited Josh Brolin as well. It was an arrogant and aggressive character that had a lot of conservative and almost oppressive viewpoints even after confronting Harvey Milk and almost befriending him. There is a sense of tension between the two of them from the beginning with Dan White constantly referencing the idea of the traditional family and the family system in order to take down views spouted by Harvey Milk - but between the two of them, Milk is presented as the one that is more likeable.

thoroughly average and sometimes god awful. The only reason it won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar at the Academy Awards is because it was not up against any real competition. Everyone knew that a screenplay about a homosexual man made by a homosexual director was going to win for the sake of diversity - but the script contained some real clichés that I completely hold to Black’s accountability. Sometimes, it did make the film itself difficult to watch because of the way in which the script would often make the situation in which they found themselves almost comical because of the strange non sequiturs or idioms that were thrown around - and that could be in the midst of a very tense situation as well. However, I think that this was just part and parcel to having everything else be polished, one thing has to be on the bottom of the list. It just happened to be the script because everything else was pretty great.

In conclusion, I did enjoy the film but I think it would have been deeper and more engaging if the script was better written. If the script was presented as being less cliché and less focused on the whole ‘we’re doing a dramatic speech’ or ‘let’s make a serious situation comical’ or even those cringe-worthy homosexual clichés which I am pretty sure Harvey Milk himself would not subscribe to - I think the film would have been far more engaging and far less insufferable from time to time. Apart from the script though, there was clearly a lot of thought put into the rest of the movie.