My Milk Review

I feel bad about saying this, but can I say this? That Milk was underwhelming. Was it just me? I walked into the theater with high hopes and expectations - but instead, left feeling a little bit cheated. The film wasn't the moving biopic I was promised. It seemed sterile. Generic. I mean, it was good, but it wasn't great. It could have been a film about any embattled rights leader - MLK, Ghandi, etc - not to belittle the work that any of these people did (including Harvey Milk), and the inspiration that they still are. I just didn't see anything uniquely gay about this film, nothing uniquely moving about Milk.

My complaint is not that there weren't enough dirty sex scenes, but that there wasn't the passion during the few sex scenes that one would expect from *any* movie these days. Instead we were teased with some pre-coital madness (some awkward barely visible fumbling in the dark), and then an abrupt cut to trite pillow talk about How I Came Out. And so I wasn't moved. I wasn't convinced that Harvey would have been so torn to choose between politics and his lovers because his lovers weren't made to be anything more than tricks turned attention-starved housewives. The movie didn't explore the emotional struggle of being gay, and instead chose to focus on the politics of being gay.

I wonder about the motivations behind this. Did Focus Features try to tone down the gayness of Milk with the lessons it learned from the disappointing loss it suffered when Brokeback Mountain failed to win Best Picture? Was Ennis Del Mar's spit-lube scene with Jack Twist in the tent too much for the average movie-goer? It seemed like Milk was trying to win acceptance with the masses, which I think Harvey himself would have found appalling! Ironically, there are a few scenes in Milk that say just that - the pool scene where Harvey tries to persuade the gay-but-hetero-normal publisher of The Advocate to back a gay candidate; the scene where Harvey flips over an ultra-vague and sanitized flyer that the Elite of gay society in California wants to send out to voters (the human rights angle, with no mention of Whose rights (the Gays) are being violated); the scene where Harvey tells his "recruits" that the best thing they can do for the gay rights movement is to Come Out. This movie did the opposite of what Harvey would have done. Much like those sanitized flyers, Milk pretty much stayed in the closet most of the time, until it was ready to talk politics or liken the gay rights struggle to some vague cosmic notion of our universal rights as human beings. It failed to personalize the story and show the true faces of those whose rights were being violated.

And why on Anita Bryant's green earth was this film rated R? Because it merely suggests that a guy is getting blown by another guy in a photo darkroom? Because Harvey and his lover Scott share a passionless one-second kiss in bed with their shirts off?
This movie might have cut it if it were made in the mid-80's. But this is 2009! And we have a Black president. Have we really come a long way?

(Sean Penn did give an excellent performance though.)