The South Wing

Thirty years ago, California voters rejected a law that would make the firing of gay teachers and public school employees who supported gay rights mandatory. No group was more astonished than the gay community, and the defeat of the bill signified a tremendous step in the fight for gay rights. But in 2008, California–sunny, glorious, liberal California with its dirty hippies and surfer bums and Hollywood reds–voted to deny same-sex couples the right to marry.

It is in the aftermath of this decision that I saw Gus Van Sant’s Milk, a biopic about the politician and gay-rights advocate Harvey Milk, played rather spectacularly by Sean Penn. It was in a theater filled with left-leaning Brooklynites like myself who shook their heads when someone on screen accused gays of being pedophiles and cried when Milk was shot and killed by fellow supervisor Dan White and clapped–yes, clapped–as the lights went up and the credits rolled.

Perhaps a movie about Milk, who, in 1977, became the first openly homosexual man to be elected to public office in California, is important, even necessary. Yet I’m not sure Milk is the movie we need, or if despite widespread critical acclaim it’s even that good of a film. There’s something a little misleading–not quite dishonest, but overly simple and perhaps reductive–about this picture. And as I walked home, amid the flurry of rainbow flags and Obama signs that decorate seemingly every other brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, I realized that I really did not learn one thing about Milk as a person except for the fact that he was a homosexual (which I already knew anyway) and that he liked opera (which I hadn’t).

Of course, I understand the impulse that Van Sant, a gay filmmaker who has mastered both the art house (with slow, impressionistic pieces like Gerry and My Own Private Idaho) and the mainstream (Good Will Hunting), must have had to create this great, hopeful message movie. Yes we can! Yes we once did! And yes we will again–one day!

But this obscures the man, the human face at the center of the San Francisco gay community and the national gay scene. And though Penn is charismatic and oddly compelling as the soft-spoken Mayor of Castro Street, and his performance feels human, he has no real discernable identity besides the rigid homosexual one. He is also impossibly good, and the only hint of a wavering of character (mentioned yet not shown) is a murky reference to his closeted past: he, apparently, never told his parents about his sexual orientation before their deaths and would hide the fact that he was living with his male lover Scott Smith (who would become his first campaign manager) when speaking with his mother on the telephone.

Harvey Milk called for all gays to come out of the closet. If a mother knows her son is gay, or a child knows his uncle is gay, or a patient his doctor is gay, or a teacher knows her favorite student is gay, that would allow for a more tolerant society. But will someone going into the theater to see Milk who is not entirely pro-gay rights see the humanity in any of the many gay men or women on screen? This is what made that infamous “gay cowboy movie” Brokeback Mountain such a successful film; the humanity on screen–the vulnerable, flawed characters, the conflicting emotions, the unabashed passion, the guilt, the grief–gave the film empathy, gave it something that most viewers (except for the most homophobic), gay or straight, something to latch onto, to recognize in themselves.

In a way, Milk is the opposite of Van Sant’s last attempt to portray a life–or, well, part of a life–on screen: his masterful Last Days about tortured artist and Nirvana front-man Kurt Cobain. Whereas Last Days was all soul and no biography (his name is even changed), Milk

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is all biography and no soul, despite its parades and rainbow flags and marches and demonstrations and those ominous gun shots at the end and all these other things that are supposed to make us feel passionate. And so we leave the theater feeling morally righteous in our liberal largess, but end up walking home feeling a little empty, a little duped, and a little lost.