Milk

2/4 stars

Note: I don't believe that you can have "spoilers" for a historical drama, so I wrote this review without regard for those concerns. If it turns out I'm wrong, and you can have spoilers... then this review's got 'em.

My objection to Milk may seem a little strange. I thought, first of all, that Sean Penn was exceptional in the title role. Without hardly changing his appearance at all, Penn is nonetheless completely swallowed by the character, embodying a unique set of mannerisms, a new persona. He has impressed me in a number of movies so far, Mystic River, I Am Sam, 21 Grams… but it wasn’t until this one that I realized how completely new he is in each performance. Actors ranging from the dispensable Dane Cook to the formidable Al Pacino have a stage persona, a set of expectations that they will often fall back on. Those like Penn, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Anthony Hopkins (to name a few) who always seem to manage a strong presence without one are impressive to me. Similarly, I’m impressed by the craft that goes into the creation of a successful period piece. A film set in the 1970s is as difficult in many ways to make convincing as one set in 1200, or in Middle Earth. Obviously my knowledge of the 70s is mostly based on movies, but still… In these areas, Milk is successful.

Nonetheless, I didn’t think it was a very good film. I’m a little more writer-centric, I think, than most reviewers you’re bound to read, but my problem with Milk was one I’ve never encountered before. The problem is that I don’t really think the story has a rising action and a falling action. In fact, I don’t think it has much dramatic structure at all. Yes, there is a brief denouement that follows Milk’s death, but this is so obviously necessary (and uninspired) that they get no credit for it. Essentially, Milk just happens until it’s done happening. The first scene is an arbitrary point in time; it almost feels like an in media res. From there, one thing follows another. There’s no change in pace, no dramatic tension, and as a consequence there are no stakes. Milk was a passionate man, and you’re interested in his struggle, but you don’t know what his goal within the context of the movie is. If you know the history behind the character of Harvey Milk then you already know that he will be elected to the board of supervisors and eventually assassinated by Dan White. I assume my knowledge on the subject is roughly average, and I didn’t know any more by way of details than that, but it was enough to rob the movie of any degree of suspense. This isn’t an inevitable feature of a historical drama, but when you make the whole question of the movie “Will he or won’t he do the thing that is the only reason he’s famous enough to have a movie,” you’re in a bad position.

This brings us to the summation, which seems to me to be the part of the review where I say good things about bad movies and vice versa. To that end: There’s a lot to like in Milk. Josh Brolin as Dan White is nearly as good as Penn, and I was glad that the movie resisted the easy temptation to play it as Milk being assassinated for being gay. The actors are excellent, the production is terrific, the dialogue snappy. For all I know, most people are likely to agree with all those rave reviews out there. But I don’t think that Milk works on a basic level, so I call it a failure. Last year, I wrote a 1 star review of No Country for Old Men, expecting to be shouted down by anyone I knew who cared enough to read it. What happened instead was that I heard, for the first time, from a lot of people who agreed with me. I’m looking forward to the feedback on this one…