Milk - Gus Van Sant, Sean Penn

The movie made by Gus Van Sant tells the story of Harvey Milk (played by Sean Penn), the first openly gay who was elected to an official position (San Francisco Board of Supervisors), assassinated soon after that, victim of a hate crime.

I think two other movies of Van Sant (Gerry and Elephant) are masterpieces. Also I think Paranoid Park is at least as good as Milk. And also I think that what makes this new film distinct from all the others is its openness, its arrogance and its pathos.

Openness: most (if not all) movies of Van Sant carry a heavy homoerotic tension; but, while in his other movies the gay relation is only suggested, here everything is as explicit as hell. Here in Milk the story is permanently switching between the public and the intimate life of his personage. This going back and forth between the two parallel flows is done with a phenomenal sense of the cinematic rhythm: Van Sant is giving here his best.

I'm trying an explanation: in any of his movies, Gus Van Sant is trying to be inside the universe he's picturing. He's not an outside observer. He is there, together with his personages, trying to understand them, to believe what they believe, to be more than a witness: to be one of them, to be each of them, to be in the middle. You feel this in all his movies. He is not in front of the camera, but you get the feeling that he is telling each time his story, not just a story. His empathy is total.

So here in Milk there was no other way for him than to be extremely candid in showing the intimate aspects. It was about the fight for gay civil rights: in order to claim their acceptance by the society they had to emphasize their specificity. And so the movie could not be other way than extremely open about the universe of gay people, in all respects.

Arrogance: it is just the openness of the movie that leads inevitably to arrogance. Van Sant is very challenging in many of his movies; only it has been for us a cinematic challenge so far; here it is a challenge for all our deep convictions, and values, and habits, and senses. Each scene comes with the same brutal question, are you ready to accept them, or just to tolerate them?

Pathos: as I said, Gus Van Sant is immersing in each of his movies, to tell us the story from there, from inside. However, he knows how to simulate objectivity. He is there, in each of his movies, he is one of the guys there while he shows everything with a kind of detachment. No more the case here, in Milk. Here his passion is obvious, here he is openly taking sides. The life of Harvey Milk becomes his own life. And, of course, Van Sant succeeds here also because of the extraordinary performance of Sean Penn.

(Gus Van Sant)