Milk

Herald rating:

* * * * *

Verdict:

Passionate portrait of a charismatic activist is a triumph for Penn.

The shadow of inevitable death stretches across Gus Van Sant's latest film as it did across the Columbine fantasia

Elephant

and the Kurt Cobain elegy

Last Days

.

It gives nothing away to say that the title character dies, since the voiceover narration has him predicting his assassination in the first scene: in 1978, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in the US, was murdered, along with the city's mayor, George Moscone, by a former councillor and Vietnam veteran named Dan White.

To its considerable credit, this dramatisation, written by first-timer Dustin Lance Black, completely and elegantly sidesteps the danger of canonising its subject. Milk, a gay activist elected to the county council of San Francisco in 1977, was a man of great humour.

His favourite, impishly self-mocking line, "My name is Harvey Milk and I am here to recruit you", was typically addressed to heterosexual, even hostile, audiences - and Van Sant's film, driven by a nuanced, generous performance from Penn, shows him as an intriguing, fully rounded human being: not a Christ-like martyr, but a flawed, extravagant, uncompromising, even slightly messy idealist.

Importantly, he is also shown as a man of sexual appetite: an early scene shows him as a pinstriped Republican stockbroker engaging in a flirtatious pickup in a New York subway station and the next scene has the two men eating birthday cake in bed. It's an important statement about the nature and source of Milk's charisma and it sets the film on the right track from the get-go.

This playful tone does not detract from the film's drama, or its passionate, righteous anger. Few movies manage the perfect cohesion of style and substance that this one displays: the evocative score by Danny Elfman and the unshowy yet terrifyingly focused cinematography of Harris Savides, both Van Sant regulars, are both remarkable, but they are always in the service of the performances.

And what performances. Penn, both unselfconscious and unshowy, perfectly nails his character's eerie magnetism and his vulnerability, while Brolin, as White, allows us to glimpse the rage seething beneath his terrifying composure. Watch out for both on Oscar night.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Sean Penn, James Franco, Josh Brolin

Director:

Gus Van Sant

Running time:

128 mins

Rating:

M - offensive language & sexual references

Screening:

Rialto, SkyCity Albany & Queen St