I was expecting a great biopic and a great performance, but I was disappointed. Sean Penn was okay, not spectacular, and the narrative of Harvey Milk’s gay right’s crusade left a lot to be desired. It seemed preachy, didactic, illogical at points, and wooden. For example, the main narrative cohesion comes from Milk, near the end of his life, dictating into a tape recorder his prediction that he will be assassinated. The information in these segments is unnecessary, and it serves mainly as a redundant plot device, but it also creates some serious character issues, in that Milk is otherwise portrayed as contemptuous of death threats (he bravely attaches one to his refrigerator and laughs it off) but suddenly (because he’s correct?) he now takes the death threats very seriously as he predicts his own assassination. What happened, exactly, to change his mind about getting death threats isn’t clear at all, and it needs to be. This was just one example of the muddy narrative, that shows events sensationalized, and ill-explained. I was hoping to like this movie a whole more.
Possibly…
…the suicide of his lover?
I don’t agree with your assessment of the film. I thought it was a very good biography of a person I wasn’t all that familiar with. If I had seen the documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk” I might be more critical.
I think you misread his attitude to the death threats. Yes, he laughed them off, but that was because it was the only way he could proceed. When Scott shows him the letter I thought it was pretty clear (without being explained) that he was simultaneously terrified and contemptuous of it.
And also, there is the fact that several years had passed, he’d become much more prominent not just in SF but around the state and even the country.
Plus, the way you act in front of your lover when scared is not necessarily the way you act when sitting in your kitchen in the middle of the night all alone when the darkest thoughts start passing through your mind.
I agree that the framing of the movie wasn’t a great device (and several elements of the story weren’t great fits for a cinematic story but that’s real life for you), but overall I thought it was very well done.
I was hoping to see the film Friday, but got caught up with school work and Christmas decorations and whatever.
I do intend to see it, but saw the documentary, “The Times Of Harvey Milk” at the Berlin FilmFest back when it opened in 1984, and got to meed the producer Rob Epstein (who went on to win an Oscar) and we talked about it for quite awhile. I was doing film reviews back then for The Advocate. It was such a powerful film that I am somewhat reluctant to go see a “Hollywood version” of the story…but as I said, I will go see it - probably next week - and will come back to this thread.
I finally saw this tonight. I disagree with the OP. I thought it was both effective and affecting. It wasn’t overwhelmingly powerful. It was, to some degree, a fairly standard, Hollywood, Oscar bait film, but the timeliness of it worked in its favor, the performances were very good (Penn especially, but Brolin, Hirsch and Franco were also good), the direction was heartfelt and pointed, and in general, the movie worked. On top of that, it’s about a person who was legitimately important and courageous, who made legitimate change, and who deserves to be given his due.
As to the death threats. I didn’t see Milk as ever laughing them off as implausible, but that he didn’t want to be paralyzed by fearing them. There’s also a scene later in the movie, as things heat up in his movement, where he regards the death threat on his refrigerator much more somberly and takes it down.
The movie also makes good use of a lot of period stock footage, by the way – and the Anita Bryant clips brought back memories. I’d almost forgotten what a crazy, psycho bitch she was. The anti-gay rhetoric in general, for that era, was much crazier than it is now – the pedophile meme, people like Bryant saying homosexuality itself should be illegal, the California Prop 6 attempt to fire teachers not only for being gay, but even for supporting gay rights. Even right wing Republican politicians can’t get away with saying shit like that anymore. I think that’s a sign of Harvey Milk’s success, despite the amount of road the movement has left to travel.
I got the idea that the recording was a contingency thing, just in case anything happened. I do think Milk started taking the death threats more seriously–after he takes the drawing down, and especially after he gets the anonymous postcard at the big rally (because now it’s the hugest public appearance of his life, and now the threat could come from anywhere)–but I don’t think he seriously anticipated anything. Especially not from Dan Brown–even going into the office with him, Milk just looked exasperated.
I liked it. The scene with the candles at the end was a deeply powerful image, and everyone was great except Diego Luna; maybe he chose to do it this way, but his performance was so hammy and ridiculous I a) saw it coming and b) couldn’t be bothered less at his death. No disrespect to the man in real life, but Luna’s character was way over the top.
One other nitpick: we have plenty of boy on boy action, but we couldn’t get one kiss or anything for Milk’s campaign manager?
As mentioned in my post above, we finally got to see the film today.
We liked it. I thought Sean Penn did a decent job as Harvey, and they did a pretty good job capturing the mood and style of the day.
Production quality was a bit lacking…did anyone else notice the boom appear at the top of the screen when Harvey gave the bullhorn to Cleve?
The documentary is a far better film, but considering it is harder to get people to watch a documentary (especially one that is a couple of decades old) I suppose it is good that this will reach a wider audience. Maybe it will get people to put the docu on their Netflix list?
Comments on our afternoon audience here in Las Vegas…mostly older (hetero?) couples, an audible gasp at the first boy on boy kiss, but overall people seemed to like it and it was a decent crowd for that time of day. On the way out, I heard a couple talking to another couple they happened to run into. The couple said, “We went to see Milk. It was very good.” Then they told a bit of the story and the women said, “We were interested as our son is Gay.”
Sorry to jump back in like this: unless you were watching a digital version, this isn’t the fault of the crew–it’s the fault of the theatre projectionist, who’s supposed to line up the black bars on the reels correctly.
I’m not one hundred percent sure, but when I was in film school, if I had directed a film and then left the boom in a shot, I would have been ripped to shreds…
Sounds to me like a quality issue… there are very easy ways in editing to see safe areas. When you’re spending millions shooting a film, someone should have caught it… I’ve never heard of anything involving projectionists and black bars on reels.
Oh, and add me to the list of people who thought Penn did an amazing job… and I think to appreciate his acting even more, you should first watch The Times of Harvey Milk…
The guy who wrote THE DA VINCI CODE? Why would Harvey be afraid of him?
You mean Dan White.
Jack’s character was also undeveloped–it may have been true as hell to real life, but a film narrative must be selective and the audience must know what every piece is doing in the story. This was just a mess. Is the point that Harvey drives his lovers to hate themselves? That Harvey keeps picking unhappy lovers? That gay people are an unhappy lot? That Harvey has something to feel guilty about? That Harvey worked too much? Who knows?
And not to keep harping on it, but to make the opposite case, the audience also has to be provided with didactic information clearly, but not repetitively. That’s my main objection to the microphone scenes: they’re not confusing (because we don’t quite know WHY he changes his tune about the death threats, and when) but becaus it’s such a dedundant, hammmy plot devie, over and over in an already-long movie. It’s most clunky, partly confusing.
It’s what actually happened.
Here’s an interview with a boom operator–he address the whole black bars thing about halfway down. Also here, on the moviemistakes site when you’re submitting a mistake:
Well, everyone should be afraid of Dan Brown. ( :smack: )
I’m sure it did. That’s my complaint. I’m sure Milk took many a shit, and several naps. We didn’t see them included, though, because they couldn’t be fit into a coherent, entertaining story line.
We didn’t see how or where or why his other two lovers who had done the same did the deed. That also “actually happened.” We didn;t see Milk coming out (or not coming out) to his own parents. There was plenty of stuff we didn’'t see that might have helped us understand his character better, but we did see a lot of this messy sub-plot with an inexplicable narrative about an Hispanic lover that didn’t move the story along very efficiently.
He said that his other two relationships had tried, not that they had succeeded, and he’d also said he believed it was because they’d had to stay closeted, so the movie did at least speculate as to an answer.
I agree that the last boyfriend was annoying distraction, but the real person was an annoying distraction in Milk’s life too. He really was a drama queen alcoholic who was a public embarrassment and who Milk’s friends (including, the ex-boyfriend Scott, who remained friends with Milk even after their relationship ended) wanted Harvey to dump. It wouldn’t have ben honest for the movie not to depict that final relationship as anything but messy and embarrassing, because that’s how it really was.
Where did you see this movie? I cannot find it anywhere near me. Neither can I find Frost/Nixon. The Empress is Not Pleased.