Milk
So happy, so pleasant, so we'll forget you used to
beat up Madonna
dir: Gus Van Sant
2008
You would have thought that the acclaimed documentary The Life and Times of Harvey Milk would have pretty much covered the story of this incandescently flamboyant political icon of the 1970s. But, let’s be honest: unless someone wins an Academy award and fictionalises the fuck out of a story, we don’t really care.
And why have footage of Harvey Milk playing Harvey Milk in a documentary about himself when you can have Sean Penn overacting all over the place instead?
So much better. To be fair, Penn mostly controls himself and delivers what is a stand-out performance in a career defined by stand-out performances, overacting, having been married to Madonna and beating up paparazzi.
I knew plenty of the details surrounding Milk’s death moreso than his life, because of the hilarious manner in which the person who murdered him used one of the most incredible defences in order to beat the rap and reduce his clearly cold-blooded and premeditated crime to an act of junk food-fuelled manslaughter due to diminished capacity. Of course the truth of what was actually argued by his defence team and what has become the pop culture meme of the “twinkie defence” are two completely different things.
What I didn’t know about the Harvey Milk story was the life story of Harvey himself. And, as far as biopic stuff goes, he seems like he was a pretty amazing man. Two hours is barely enough to do anyone’s life and times justice (though my biopic could be comfortably encompassed within a short film of forty or so seconds), but the director, screenwriters and actors have done a more than decent job of revealing who he was and why he mattered, and the times in which he lived.
- Read more about Milk
- 5272 reads
