Milk

Awards season has been and gone, and its original release is firmly in the past, but ‘Milk’ seems firmly on its way to becoming something of a Tyneside Cinema staple. So why the continuing love?
First things first: Sean Penn’s received wide acclaim for his depiction of politician and groundbreaking gay rights activist Harvey Milk. Tracing his progression from an insecure, semi-closeted businessman to (at the time) the most powerful openly homosexual politician in America, Sean Penn refuses the easy route of deification, revealing his hidden doubts and flaws while still demonstrating the undoubtable conviction to his cause: it’s a masterful performance that won Penn an Oscar quite rightfully.
But ‘Milk’ is no one-man show, whatever the title or the publicity might suggest. In particular, director Gus Van Sant deserves particular credit for the way he manages to make San Francisco itself a character, with even the self-contained environ of the Castro gaining an epic grandeur that makes this real-life battle for acceptance all the more emotionally draining – the candlelight procession through the city’s streets at the end especially is a supreme symbiosis of man and land that lingers long after you’ve emerged back into Newcastle’s roads. Although some minor criticisms can be made at some of the more notable contrivances in the script (Jack Lira’s fate as written in this film is a moment of melodrama that detracts from the finely-judged realism of the other two hours), ‘Milk’ is still a remarkable achievement. In condensing the progress of a movement from its inception through to glory and into subsequent struggles (the audience being left to infer the damage that AIDS would inflict upon the gay community, as well as being shown Milk’s violent end) and in providing such a remarkable document of one of the key figures involved in it, not to mention with the artistry with which it does so, ‘Milk’ is surely an achievement with little parallel.

Review by Mark Corcoran-Lettice