So after the present opening and overeating, we engaged in what is becoming the third part of the Christmas Trinity, going to the movies. Took the family to see "Milk" which is a compelling depiction of the intersection between the life of an individual, the birth of a movement, and the interplay between leadership, activism, and practical politics. We see Harvey Milk go, in eight short years, from being a closeted New York businessman to being one of America's first openly gay elected officials, after having moved to San Francisco, a city in process of becoming a gay Mecca. Milk had a rare talent for combining protest politics and a rabble rouser's instincts with that of a legislative deal maker. His assassination in 1978 cut short a career that seemed to hold enormous promise. But even in the short time that he was on the scene as a political activist and then office holder, his impact was enormous.
Sean Penn is unfailingly good in the title role. It is a pretty restrained performance by him and one that strikes me as being an awfully good depiction of the man himself. If you like the movie, I recommend a documentary about him that was released in 1984, "The Times of Harvey Milk" or the Randy Shiltz biography of him, "The Mayor of Castro Street."
I was rather surprised to see Matt Yglesias's comments today about the movie, in which he essentially says that Milk's story isn't that interesting because Milk never won election in a race outside of a very gay-friendly district in the Castro and Haight-Ashbury. To come away from this movie with this as the central criticism is to so miss the point it is scary -- it's like arguing that Julian Bond is not an interesting figure because he only served as a State Rep. in the Georgia legislature and never held higher office.
What Matt seems to miss utterly is the human story represented by Milk and the Castro activists -- these were people transforming their lives and demanding to be accorded the respect to which every individual is entitled. This has been an enormous deal over the last thirty years, one which has had huge implications for millions of people. I graduated from high school in 1978, the year in which Milk was assassinated. I know now that I had friends and acquaintances who were gay and would not, in a million years, have admitted it, so painful would the social consequences have been. Even at my uber liberal private college in Massachusetts, there were very few people who were comfortable being out at that time. And I am sure that I made idiotic jokes about gay people in the presence of some of these people without ever having the good sense to think about what I was saying.
Matt reveals an absolutely juvenile sense of history and humanity in writing something like this. Harvey Milk helped change the world a helluva lot more than most statwewide or national politicians could ever imagine, and in the process did so much to improve the lives of so many. A movie should stand or fall on its artistic merits and Milk more than meets the standards of a good film. However, any review or commentary that loses sight of the genuinely dramatic political and social events it depicts is really missing something rather fundamental.
Go see it and let me know what you think. (I'll write about "Slumdog Millionaire" later.)
