The real times of Harvey Milk

"In the film, Milk doesn't make much of a point about those lost years. "Forty years old and what have I done with my life?" he asks a new lover near the beginning. But the script is never explicit about what prevented him from living fully before 1973, the pivotal year in which he opened his camera store in the Castro. For a better sense of the painful secrecy Milk endured as a closeted gay man living in a pre-Stonewall world, and of the subsequent, purposeful freedom he felt during his belated coming-out, one can turn not only to Robert Epstein and Richard Schmiechen's exceptional 1984 film, The Times of Harvey Milk (which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 1985), but to the bits of documentary footage Van Sant inserts into Milk's manufactured world.

[...] Milk worked as a high school math and history teacher and basketball coach, for an insurance company, and then as research supervisor for Bache and Company, a Wall Street investment firm. Stolid and bourgeois, he slogged on, wearing suits and punching a time clock, not quite knowing who he might be, and always hiding behind his at times overwhelming personal responsibilities and burdens. He took a series of younger lovers, all of whom were in some way needy or damaged. (Several attempted suicide, with the last, Jack Lira, succeeding some months before Milk's own death.) Hoping to temper the insecurities of Jack McKinley, a lover who suffered from manic depression, abused drugs and alcohol, and frequently threatened suicide, the still-closeted Milk pulled up stakes in 1967 and moved with McKinley to Dallas, where he worked for Bache's Texas branch. Three weeks after arriving, McKinley, bored, went back to New York. Milk returned a year later.Van Sant's aesthetic is constricted by the fixed nature of biography. After Milk has brought us up to 1973, the year Milk decides to run for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, one feels that Van Sant loses interest in the story. There's no room for invention—not with his actors, or even his cinematographer. He must stick to the facts, or to those facts that make Milk Milk—that is, a subject worthy of a biopic. Early on in the film, when Van Sant inserts ghostly documentary images of people in and around the Castro in the 1970s into the montage, one has the sense that the director is making a subtle point about the film's manufactured past in relation to the "real" past of the Castro.

As we watch Milk run for a seat on the Board of Supervisors (between 1973 and 1976, he ran and lost three times, twice for the Board of Supervisors and once for the California State Assembly), Penn becomes less of an ensemble player, and by all appearances begins to direct himself. It's as if, denied the opportunity to play with the images as much as he'd like, Van Sant has given up playing at all. Left to his own devices, Penn becomes too actory. But it's Emile Hirsch (playing Cleve Jones, Milk's teenage protégé) who forces Penn to return to the seductive openness he demonstrated in the beginning of the film. Dressed in shorts, his hair a mass of curls, Jones was a recent transplant to San Francisco when he met Milk in the Castro in 1973. Having survived more than his share of anti-gay crimes in his home state of Arizona, Jones arrived in San Francisco armed with his only defense—his smart mouth, and reflexive irony.

By the time he meets Milk by chance near the latter's camera shop and thinks he's being hit on, Hirsch lets those defenses show—physically and verbally. He's attracted to Milk's paternalism and disturbed by that attraction. During that first meeting, he's drawn to Milk as he walks away. But as Milk talks, Hirsch seems to resign himself to his attraction, letting his arms fall to his sides. In most of their scenes, Hirsch makes Penn resist the temptation to play cute by confronting him with a vulnerability that's greater than his own. Indirectly, Hirsch represents Van Sant's intuitive visual approach to filmmaking, while Penn sticks close to his need to please—a desire that mirrors Milk's own desire to charm, always.
By 1975, Milk had become an ally of Mayor George Moscone, who helped institute a system by which candidates for the Board of Supervisors ran by district rather than from the city at large. In 1977, Milk launched his fourth campaign from the Castro, which is to say the newly created District Five. This time, he won the election—and a larger platform from which to articulate one of his biggest political causes, equal rights for gay people. The effects of his own history of secrecy weighed heavily on Milk. In the film, Penn puts it bluntly: "I've had four lovers, and three of them attempted suicide. And it's my fault, because I made them stay in the closet." Milk's tendency to be drawn to the disenfranchised finds its final object, in a way, in Dan White, a straight, sports-loving San Francisco native who was one of his colleagues on the Board of Supervisors. (Given Milk's early years as a sports enthusiast, it's relatively easy to see why he feels for White: White is the man Milk could have become had he married and remained closeted)". Source: www.nybooks.com

Sean Penn's Acceptance Speech for "Milk":