24 Jan 2009
ON MILK
I was at the GAZE premiere of Milk a couple of weeks ago in the IFI, part of an audience mainly made up of gay people.
Because its about the fight for gay rights in the late 1970s, a fight that is still going on today, and the film is populated with footage of Christian fundamentalist bigots like Anita Bryant saying hateful things about gay people, I found the experience of watching it incredibly tense. I think that tension was heightened because almost everyone in the room was feeling the same thing.
I went to the screening with my son, who just happens to be heterosexual, and when I said the film made me tense, he didn't really understand. To him it was just an interesting story about an interesting man. And not hugely interesting at that.
Gay people have very different reactions to films about gay issues than straight people. I saw 'Brokeback Mountain' with an audience of gays, who were all sobbing their hearts out by the end, and with an audience of mainly straights, who looked silently shell-shocked as they exited the cinema.
In that light, I don't think 'Milk' is a very successful film. It doesn't speak in a broad about the historic prejudices about, injustices against and marginalisation of gay people in the same way that biopics of people like Malcolm X spoke about the historic injustices and cruelties of racism.
Perhaps this is because 'Milk' is a little less broadly drawn than 'Malcolm X'. In 'Milk' the main character is not extremely likeable or charming. He's dithering and often unfocussed. The depiction of violence against gay people born out of fundamentalist hatred is fleeting and mostly suggested in voiceover. And the 'baddie', that is the man who eventually assassinated Harvey Milk, Dan White, is a sketchy character without clear motivation.
This might have been true about Dan White in real life, but a cinematic depiction of a real-life character has to be more clearly drawn if it is to make audiences respond the way the filmmaker wants them to. It's all about manipulation.
Without that manipulation, straight audiences will react to 'Milk' in a different way to gay audiences, because they have no experience of being at the bum end of anti-gay discrimination. They are not given enough of a reason to care about gay rights by the film - they can vaguely care, but probably not much more than that.
Far better than 'Milk' is Rob Epstein's documentary 'The Times of Harvey Milk', which won an Oscar in 1985. It would stir any soul, gay or straight, against the injustices endured by gay people throughout history and at one particular moment in San Francisco, when they came to the surface with tragic and far-reaching results.