January 2009

The Times of Harvey Milk (1984, Director: Rob Epstein): With all the pub­li­city around Milk, Gus Van Sant’s biopic of pion­eering gay polit­ical figure Harvey Milk, I’d been hearing on good authority that Rob Epstein’s Oscar-winning doc­u­mentary, now almost 25 years old, was better in almost every way. So before seeing Sean Penn’s fic­tional por­trayal (which even from the trailer looks powerful), I wanted to learn more about the man and his story.

Milk was the epi­tome of a local politi­cian. He owned a camera store in the San Francisco neigh­bour­hood known as the Castro and became involved in politics because of neigh­bour­hood issues. He ran for the pos­i­tion of city super­visor (coun­cillor) three times unsuc­cess­fully, until a change in the rules allowed each neigh­bour­hood to vote for its own super­visor. Buoyed by the gay vote, he was finally elected in 1977, but only served 11 months before he and San Francisco’s mayor, George Moscone, were shot and killed by one of their col­leagues, Supervisor Dan White, who’d resigned and then been unsuc­cessful in get­ting his job back. Milk is regarded as America’s first openly gay politi­cian, and he knew there was always a risk of assas­sin­a­tion. In fact, Epstein’s film begins with an audio recording Milk made about a year before his death, stating that it should only be played in the case of his death by assassination.

The film itself is a com­bin­a­tion of local news footage and inter­views with his friends. The nar­ra­tion by Harvey Fierstein con­veys the sense of sad­ness and loss that the gay com­munity were still feeling. In fact, the film was made just six years after Milk’s death and the emo­tions of the inter­viewees are still raw, espe­cially when dis­cussing the sub­sequent trial of White, who served only five years for the murders. The gay com­munity was out­raged at the lenient sen­tence, and Epstein covers the “White Night Riots” that fol­lowed the ver­dict. White’s law­yers suc­cess­fully argued that he was suf­fering from depres­sion and didn’t intend to kill Milk and Moscone, des­pite the fact that he con­fronted them in their offices with a gun (and extra ammo) he smuggled into City Hall by climbing in a window to avoid the recently-installed metal detectors. This case was also the origin of the infamous “Twinkie defense”, in which his law­yers argued that he may have been suf­fering from the effects of eating too much junk food, and there­fore had “dimin­ished capa­city” for thought, making him incap­able of pre­med­it­a­tion in the killings.

Although the film does suc­ceed in por­traying Milk as part of a move­ment, rather than just a saintly cru­sader, I would have liked a bit more detail about him and his life. There was very little men­tion of his partner Scott Smith or his life before he came to San Francisco in 1972 at the age of 42. Interviewers hinted at his bursts of temper, but I would have liked to hear more about his volatile per­son­ality. Archived record­ings show that he was a powerful speaker, but his battle to get elected shows that he wasn’t able to win over everyone. He had many polit­ical rival­ries, even with other gay act­iv­ists, and although it would have made the film longer, it would have also made it more nuanced. As well, I found out that Dan White had been a Vietnam vet, a police officer and a fireman before becoming a city super­visor, and I think more explor­a­tion of his back­ground would have made the film stronger, espe­cially in light of the fact that he com­mitted sui­cide in 1985, less than two years after his release.

Overall, Epstein cap­tures the spirit of the times, and the sense that Milk was car­ried along on the chan­ging polit­ical cur­rent. He was not only America’s first openly gay politi­cian, but its first gay martyr. In the light of the pop­ularity and crit­ical acclaim for Van Sant’s film, I would love for Epstein to revisit the sub­ject in another film someday.

Official web site of the film
Telling Pictures, dir­ector Rob Epstein’s pro­duc­tion com­pany
Wikipedia entry on Harvey Milk

(8/10)

Tagged as: assassination, homosexuality, politics

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