Milk review
December 18th 2008 00:23
Milk, a movie about the first openly gay elected public official in America, is the best film its director, Gus Van Sant, has ever made.
Milk’s best feature is a cast that all manage to completely disappear inside their respective roles. Sean Penn and Josh Brolin, who play the titular character and his assassin respectively, both bring a humanity and understanding to their characters. You really get a feel for the former’s charisma and you don’t demonise the latter despite his terrible deeds. Not to mention Emile Hirsh, James Franco and Diego Luna who all put in terrific performances.
The statement that I made in the first sentence of this review is based mainly on this cast, which gives this film a substance that films like Elephant and Last Days sometimes lacked. Don’t get me wrong, his other films are all terrific (with the exception of his pointless remake of Psycho) but they often had very little to them. Emptiness was a major theme of the films in Van Sant’s “death trilogy” (Gerry, Elephant and Last Days) so it makes sense that they would seem a little light on substance. However, they also often revolved around the singular performances of very lonely actors. Which sometimes felt like you ordered a three-course meal and when it arrived all of the three courses were steak. I like steak, but that’s too much.
Despite the attention he’ll almost definitely receive from the Academy, Milk is much more than Penn’s performance. Everyone in it is fantastic, the direction is inspired and the use of archived news footage is seamlessly edited into the style of the film.
Biopics often seem so unnatural in the way they cut through years of a person’s life to get to the important events. Milk does these jumps with such gymnastic skill it would have no trouble making its way into the Russian Olympic team. With the flow of the film working so perfectly, it allows us to concentrate on the characters, and be deeply moved and angered by their struggle. This is a truly powerful film, and I fully believe that if it were released earlier in the year it would have had a huge effect on the outcome of the Proposition 8 vote, which moved to ban gay marriage.
My mark for this film: I haven’t yet figured out an interesting marking system, so I will give Milk two thumbs up, five stars, ten out of ten, an emoticon smiley face and recommendation that you see it in the cinema when it finally arrives in Australia on January 29.
Milk’s best feature is a cast that all manage to completely disappear inside their respective roles. Sean Penn and Josh Brolin, who play the titular character and his assassin respectively, both bring a humanity and understanding to their characters. You really get a feel for the former’s charisma and you don’t demonise the latter despite his terrible deeds. Not to mention Emile Hirsh, James Franco and Diego Luna who all put in terrific performances.
The statement that I made in the first sentence of this review is based mainly on this cast, which gives this film a substance that films like Elephant and Last Days sometimes lacked. Don’t get me wrong, his other films are all terrific (with the exception of his pointless remake of Psycho) but they often had very little to them. Emptiness was a major theme of the films in Van Sant’s “death trilogy” (Gerry, Elephant and Last Days) so it makes sense that they would seem a little light on substance. However, they also often revolved around the singular performances of very lonely actors. Which sometimes felt like you ordered a three-course meal and when it arrived all of the three courses were steak. I like steak, but that’s too much.
Despite the attention he’ll almost definitely receive from the Academy, Milk is much more than Penn’s performance. Everyone in it is fantastic, the direction is inspired and the use of archived news footage is seamlessly edited into the style of the film.
Biopics often seem so unnatural in the way they cut through years of a person’s life to get to the important events. Milk does these jumps with such gymnastic skill it would have no trouble making its way into the Russian Olympic team. With the flow of the film working so perfectly, it allows us to concentrate on the characters, and be deeply moved and angered by their struggle. This is a truly powerful film, and I fully believe that if it were released earlier in the year it would have had a huge effect on the outcome of the Proposition 8 vote, which moved to ban gay marriage.
My mark for this film: I haven’t yet figured out an interesting marking system, so I will give Milk two thumbs up, five stars, ten out of ten, an emoticon smiley face and recommendation that you see it in the cinema when it finally arrives in Australia on January 29.
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