After hitting the creative bullseye with Palme d'Or winner Elephant, and then missing the board altogether with his atrocious follow-up Paranoid Park, the ever-wayward Gus Van Sant now posts a respectably middling score with Milk. An engaging and ultimately quite moving biopic of assassinated politician Harvey Milk (Sean Penn, treading a fine line between inspiration and impersonation) – the first ever openly gay person elected to major public office in the United States – it's perhaps Van Sant's most high-profile project to date. Which maybe explains why his approach is careful, dutiful and steady – surprisingly conventional, even – as we follow Milk's transition from closeted New York insurance worker to San Francisco district supervisor over the space of eight years.
   Along the way we observe Milk's relationships with his lovers (James Franco's reliable Scott to Diego Luna's erratic Jack), fellow gay-rights activists, and colleagues at San Francisco City Hall. The latter include, most fatefully, Dan White (Josh Brolin), straight-arrow supervisor of a neighbouring, much more conservative district, whose various simmering discontents find homicidal outlet in the picture's final act. Van Sants charts Milk's minor and major battles on his journey from obscurity to celebrated public figure, chronicling the turbulent 1970s in San Francisco and in the nation as a whole.
   But while Milk serves as a competent introduction to a necessary and – given recent developments in California – still, how very sad to have to say, pressingly topical story, it never quite manages to find its proper stride, let alone have the same electrifying effect on its audiences as Harvey Milk so often achieved during his own public appearances.
   Part of the problem is that Van Sant and his collaborators are operating under some pretty daunting shadows: there's the palpable and understandable desire to do justice to Milk, without crossing over into tub-thumping hagiography. And then there's also the existence of a terrific and well-known documentary on almost exactly the same subject – Rob Epstein's Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk from 1984, cited as a major influence during Milk's closing credits. More obliquely, there's David Fincher's Zodiac – which quite recently managed to bring the same city, during a very similar kind of time-frame, to vibrant, atmospheric, deeply authentic-feeling life.
   Milk does just OK in this regard, mixing dramatisations with TV-news and amateur 8mm/16mmm footage. The results, held together by Penn's exposition-heavy narration (as Milk records his memories onto cassettes in his kitchen one evening shortly before his death), are serviceably convincing in terms of period detail, and reasonably engaging in the basic terms of pacing and drama.
   This is clearly a film intended for pretty mainstream audiences – who may want to know more about this seminal figure, but without too much exposure to the milky "seminal" fluids he exchanged with his lovers: the picture is pretty coy when it comes to gay lovemaking, and on the whole plays things a bit too safe considering it's supposedly a tribute to such a man presented as such an iconoclast provocateur.

Neil Young, 26th January, 2009

seen : 24th January, 2009
cinema : Cineworld, Milton Keynes, UK
format : 35mm
paid : – (complimentary ticket)

MVP : Sean Penn
respected second opinion : Joanne Laurier, WSWS