Milk is a film about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person to hold a major public office in California. The movie follows Milk from his 40^th birthday until he was assassinated at age 48, and his effects on the gay rights movement in San Francisco. Until I had seen this film, Harvey Milk was unknown to me; but it sounded like he should be an influential figure in (recent) history that I should know, similar to Martin Luther King.

I thought this was supposed to be an engaging story, but I was disappointed in the beginning. I think the problem was my lack of background with Milk. I didn’t know who he was so didn’t understand him as a person; was he an orator and how did he come to have such influence? I felt there was too little time spent on his personal background and his participation in the grassroots movements before suddenly holding public office. Although clocking in over 2 hours, this would have had to be a documentary to do the subject material justice.

The story comes together nicely in the end though, covering Milk’s fight against California Proposition 6 which aimed to prevent gays and lesbians from working in the public school system. That and Sean Penn’s acting (he won an Oscar for Best Actor in this role) made Milk a three out of five star movie in my book. The epilogue was also great as it showed real life pictures of who the characters were based on; the casting and costumes made them look really similar!

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: bayarea, moviereview, usa