Milk (Van Sant, 2008)
I walked into this one with trepidation: I tend to loathe bio-pics and am usually disappointed by movies marketed with a GLBT label. What could be more painfully trite and formulaic than a gay bio-pic? I’d like to say that Milk exceeded my expectations on both accounts; alas, it did not. While Sean Penn was pretty magnificent in the role of Harvey Milk, the film seemed to conspire at every turn to minimize the effects of his performance. The dialogue was often awkward and unwieldy, and I thought the strongest moments were when Penn wasn’t speaking, but reacting to something while framed in a close-up shot. I also rather like Emile Hirsch as Cleve and would’ve liked more of his story. One fault of the bio-pic formula, in my opinion, is that the world surrounding the main character is too limited in scope: we’re really only able to care for many of the characters as they affect the story of Harvey Milk (or whoever the subject of the biography is), which makes the whole endeavor feel rather false. On the whole, though, the film was slightly better than I expected: it was a rather good bio-pic, but didn’t break out of that formula enough for me to consider it a rather good film.
Rating: 3/5
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