Any friend of The Dork Report will know that I almost uni­ver­sally hate biopics. As I’ve com­plained in my reviews of Con­trol, The Div­ing Bell and the But­ter­fly, and even Walk Hard, I believe that the fea­ture film is fun­da­men­tally ill suited for biog­ra­phy. One seem­ingly minor les­son from col­lege that wound up stick­ing with me is Edgar Allen Poe’s def­i­n­i­tion of the short story as a prose piece that can be expe­ri­enced in a sin­gle sit­ting (The Phi­los­o­phy of Com­po­si­tion, 1846). No one expects a seri­ous por­trait of a person’s entire life in a few pages, so why should we applaud a movie? The fea­ture film’s two-hour run­ning time is more akin to a short story than to a book-length novel or biog­ra­phy, and yet the biopic is a dom­i­nant genre in movies. I would argue the pri­mary rea­son is that they give ambi­tious actors the oppor­tu­nity to exer­cise their imi­ta­tion skills. It pleases audi­ences who per­ceive “true sto­ries” as being of greater merit than fic­tion (mere make-believe!), and pan­der­ing to the Acad­emy, who love noth­ing bet­ter than a tech­ni­cally impres­sive mim­icry of an addict or hand­i­capped per­son. I actu­ally wel­comed Walk Hard, for although a ter­ri­ble movie itself, it finally mocked the for­mu­laic drug-addicted musi­cian biopics Ray, Walk the Line, La Vie En Rose, and El Cantante.

Direc­tor Gus Van Sant and writer Dustin Lance Black’s Milk, on the other hand, strikes me as less insin­cere than its peers. For one thing, it exam­ines only a ten-year span of a man’s life, avoid­ing the genre’s usual Cliff’s Notes-like approach to sum­ma­riz­ing a famous figure’s life into a series of high­lights. And yes, Sean Penn did win an Oscar for a lively, spir­ited per­for­mance worlds apart from his nat­ural demeanor. But I believe he, like every­one else involved, approached the project with noth­ing but the high­est integrity, and truly hoped the timely project could affect pub­lic opinion.

Milk was in the­aters dur­ing shortly after the national debate over California’s Propo­si­tion 8, which denied the right to marry to a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion (thanks to com­menter Sap­pho­crat below for the cor­rec­tion). It’s impos­si­ble to miss the par­al­lels to Har­vey Milk’s strug­gle in 1978 against Propo­si­tion 6, which would have enabled the fir­ing of homo­sex­ual teach­ers and (this is the truly amaz­ing part) any­one that sup­ported them. One of the movie’s biggest achieve­ments is that it empha­sized the sheer urgency of the gay rights move­ment. Equal­ity was not just some­thing that’s time had come. Gays were not only fight­ing for rights they hoped some day to have; they were fight­ing to keep the what rights they did have from being taken away.

I must admit that all I knew about Har­vey Milk was the tan­gen­tial bit of trivia that his assas­sin Dan White (Josh Brolin) was the first to employ the infa­mous “Twinkie Defense” in court, claim­ing that a diet of junk food altered his body chem­istry and cre­ated a tem­po­rary state of insan­ity. Har­vey was orig­i­nally a New York insur­ance man, clos­eted from cowork­ers and fam­ily, but not so much so that he couldn’t brazenly pick up a stranger on the sub­way (with gay­dar so fine-tuned that he could imme­di­ately tell that what I would assume to a normal-looking dude in 70s fash­ions was a fel­low Friend of Dorothy). Scott Smith (James Franco) urges him to move to Cal­i­for­nia where he can live more hon­estly. Har­vey ini­tially is happy to just live his new life, but becomes politi­cized as he faces prej­u­di­cial oppo­si­tion to his small business.

Although it may seem to con­tra­dict part of my tirade against biopics at the begin­ning on this post, it might have been illu­mi­nat­ing to see a lit­tle more of Har­vey as a younger man, before he blos­somed into a polit­i­cally aware, out man. We only learn through pass­ing dia­logue that he hid not only his sex­u­al­ity but even Scott’s very exis­tence from his fam­ily. If the aim was to com­press the essence of Har­vey Milk into a short-form nar­ra­tive, it strikes me that the major dra­matic arc would be his trans­for­ma­tion from a clos­eted man into some­one that would later ask an entire com­mu­nity to come out at once.

Offi­cial movie site: www.milkthemovie.com

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