Milk

One of the best films of 2008

Milk tells the story of gay people in the ’70s fighting for the exact same civil rights that the blacks fought for just one decade earlier. It doesn’t matter where you stand on Prop 8 or gay marriage, Milk is made for anyone who values equality and wants to know the history about it.

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man elected to major office in the United States. It took him several years to finally be elected, but when he was, he started the revolution that asked gays to come out of the closet and stand up for equality. History tells the rest of the story from there, and if you weren’t born by that time, I’ll leave it up to the film to tell you where it went.

Director Gus Van Sant left his unconventional storytelling ways and returned to his Good Will Hunting style for Milk. Instead of walking you through a film of silent stagnant shots, Milk is told by Harvey Milk through an audio narrative he recorded to be his autobiography – that’s not to say he doesn’t use those techniques in Milk; he only uses them when building a strong intensity. And it works beautifully.

With Van Sant’s beautiful direction and natural way of telling the story combined with brilliant acting from Sean Penn (as Harvey Milk), Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, James Franco and a nearly unknown brilliant cast of no-names, Milk earns my rarely offered title as being a “perfect” film.

No matter how good Milk is, there is a large group of ignorant people who will refuse to see it simply because of the recent controversy surrounding Prop 8, gay characters and the arguable stand on gay rights. Milk has nothing to do with those ideas. It’s about gays fighting to not be discriminated against in the workplace. Yes, that same push for civil rights is what lead up to Prop 8 thirty years later, but you can’t decided to not see it based on that idea alone. Milk doesn’t take you through any civil rights fights that the black didn’t go through themselves. If you can watch black civil rights being fought in Malcolm X, then you can watch them through the gay point of view in Milk. You can be for it or against it, but there’s no denying that Milk is a one-of-a-kind beautiful film that you wont soon forget.

Photo credit: Focus Features