“Milk”

Actually got out to see a movie yesterday, thanks to The Missus’ parents offering to babysit the young one.

Since it was going to be a date movie, “The Spirit” would have to wait and we went to go see Gus Van Zandt’s “Milk,” about assassinated San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk instead.

Now (director) Van Zandt has made some truly unwatchable films in his time. “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues” and “My Own Private Idaho” spring immediately to mind. He’s also made a couple of really good films, for instance “Drugstore Cowboy” and “Good Will Hunting.”

With “Milk,” however, he’s taken his game to a whole new level. This is the kind of film that they should show kids in school when the curriculum turns to civil rights.

And star Sean Penn, as Harvey Milk, deserves an Oscar for his performance. He totally disappears into his role. As always, he goes for broke, and with this film, he has found a vehicle worthy of his protean talents.

If you’re reading this blog, you likely already know the film’s story. Milk was the first openly gay man elected to public office in America and he spent his cruelly abbreviated public-service career battling the proponents of organized anti-gay prejudice (orange juice peddler Anita Bryant and various evangelical loudmouths chief among them).

The film even contained a few surprises for me, like the fact that soon-to-be-President Ronald Reagan was among those who supported Milk’s efforts to strike down California’s ban on gay school teachers. In the opening montage of the film are images of newspaper reports of people being arrested just for being gay. WTF? That this happened in America – during my lifetime… it’s still hard to wrap my head around.

I remember being in high school when the incidents portrayed in this film were going down. I wasn’t politically-conscious back then (spent most of time trying to be as generally unconscious as booze and modern pharmacology would allow me to be), but could still see that what was going on was a repellant outrage and un-American to its core. So I wrote an anti-Anita Bryant editorial for the school paper and had to endure the hassling of the jock über-class the rest of my time at that school. I wore their scorn (and off-target epithets and occasional shoves into the lockers) with some pride. Even then I understood that if these were the kind of people who represented the opposition, chances are I was on the right side of the issue.

But I never knew the details till now. This film should have been a celebratory dramatization of another proud step forward in America’s ongoing fight to secure equal rights for all, but as is all too often the case, ends up being a bittersweet elegy for yet one more fallen American civil rights hero.

“Milk” even made me re-think California’s recently-passed legislation forbidding gays to marry. Even though I voted against the proposition, my support was lukewarm and I didn’t shed any tears when it went down in flames. I figured, hey, the gay rights struggle is a relatively new one and social change usually takes a long time. Be patient, my gay and lesbian fellow citizens. Your time will come.

But “Milk” served to remind me that discrimination is discrimination and as Martin Luther King so correctly observed (before he was gunned down in his prime), “We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”

So if not now, when? If not us, who?

Hopefully, “Milk” will win a handful of trophies come awards season and will re-invigorate the debate. This time, my heart – in addition to my vote – will be in it.