Milk (2008)

"Hello! My name is Harvey Milk, and I'm here to recruit you!" Such was the self-satirizing refrain by which San Francisco grassroots politician Harvey Milk liked to introduce himself. The first openly gay candidate elected to public office, Milk began to take a stand and assert equal rights for the gay community in the 1970s, first by leading the establishment of a beachhead in the Castro district where gays could band together against police dragnets and brutality. (He saw his advocacy as a successor to the civil rights struggle for blacks in the 1960s while the right wing, famously led by Anita Bryant and others into the 1980s, preached that the gay agenda was to recruit and subvert God-fearing Christian children -- a homophobic assertion he cogently denied.) As an avowed heterosexual, I have no interest in seeing or hearing two men kiss and have sex, though to be fair the handful of such scenes in Milk were mainly in the dark or off-camera. More important are the Promethean qualities evinced by Milk's self-awareness and courage as he counsels young gays away from suicide induced by a gay-hating society. His civic leadership and national fame seems as important to the GLBT community as was Martin Luther King Jr.'s to the black community -- though the movie makes it clear that Milk knew the value of sound bites and staged theatrics. Indeed, the protests in this movie are so well choreographed -- everyone's fists pumping and every chanted slogan in perfect sync -- as to be engineered by a force greater than gay genes: Hollywood hagiography (plus many original protesters). Had he not been assassinated at 52 by a disgruntled co-worker, Milk would doubtless have become BFFs with Elton John, Princess Di, Versace, and the rest of their coterie. Though no saint, Milk was a clear-eyed, optimistic, humorous, self-deprecating populist precisely because he was a gay man who had faced his demons and persecutors and come to terms with who he had been made to be. As he famously said, "You've gotta give them hope!" The special features provide great historical perspective. For technical and narrative factors, 4 stars, but for mixed emotional impact, 3.5 stars.