Milk

These are my notes for Milk which we screened in mid November. Work has been pretty hectic, so I need to catch up on things.

Milk

USA 2008 (129 minutes)
Director: Gus Van Sant
Starring: Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch and Josh Brolin

Awards and Nominations
Won Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Sean Penn)
Won Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (Dustin Lance Black)
Six further Oscar nominations including Best Film and Best Director
A further 32 wins and 39 nominations

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay politician to hold a major public office in the US. After moving to California he became a campaigner for gay rights and was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1975. Three years later a disaffected fellow Supervisor assassinated both Milk and George Moscone, the Mayor of San Francisco

Dustin Lance Black spent three years researching Milk’s life and interviewing Milk’s associates after seeing the 1984 documentary The Life and Times of Harvey Milk and used this work to produce his screenplay. The screenplay reached Gus Van Sant, who had made an abortive attempt to make his own film on the life of Harvey Milk fifteen years previously, and Van Sant at once decided to film it. The film makers used Milk’s original camera shop as well as San Francisco City Hall as key locations, and several of Milk’s associates portray themselves. Other characters portrayed in the film are still active in US public life and of these the most prominent is Dianne Feinstein, who made the announcement of the assassination of Milk and Moscone to the media. After succeeding Moscone as mayor she was subsequently elected to the US Senate and in 2009 she presided over the inauguration of Barack Obama.

Gus Van Sant had made several small independent films which had been artistically successful before obtaining commercial success with the black comedy To Die For (1995), which gave Nicole Kidman a breakthrough role as a homicidally ambitious weather girl on a cable TV station, and Good Will Hunting (1997), which launched the careers of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. After the commercial failure of a strangely pointless shot for shot colour remake of Psycho (1998) Van Sant returned to series of smaller scale films which continued to win artistic plaudits, culminating in his winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Elephant (2003), a story inspired by the 1999 Columbine High School massacre.

Critics gave Milk widespread acclaim and Sean Penn, who bears a surprising physical resemblance to the real Harvey Milk, won many awards including a second Oscar, for his performance. The film appeared on many critics’ lists of the best films of 2008.