Another trip to the multiplex, another Oscar-nominated disappointment. This is such a great story but it's sadly just too conventional a retelling. The film opened with Penn, as Harvey Milk, recounting back his tale into a tape recorder- one of the oldest tricks in the biopic book. Apart from this being obvious and unoriginal, I was immediately reminded of Billy Wilder's noir masterpiece 'Double Indemnity' and if you're going to invite comparisons like that, then you'd better have something good up your sleeve to follow. And this isn't anything special at all.
There are good things in the film. Not least some great performances- Sean Penn is inspired (aside from the moment that he is on the verge of giving it up and is talked around in about half a second, but the script gave him bugger all to work with there), James Franco, who I've only ever seen in the utterly abject 'Pineapple Express', is charming and Josh Brolin does the very best he can with limited screen time. The Josh Brolin character is interesting because his role is obviously pivotal, yet his character arc is almost entirely missing from the script. Brolin conveys a lot of turmoil and frustration in his few opportunities, but the transition from Brolin's discomfiture to murderous rage is unbelievable (an award-nominated script shouldn't have such yawning logical gaps for me- it needed another few minutes of screen time to make that change believable). But not all of the performances are of that standard anyway- Diego Luna is crap in this. Absolute crap. I'm sorry but looking pretty and having the right accent really isn't enough. Emile Hirsch isn't much cop either, while I'm on the subject.
The film is well shot and edited for the most part. It looks authentic and even the riot scenes look fairly believable (which is a real rarity) but there are really ropey moments- the people in boxes as the message spreads graphic was really poor, especially as there were about 100 boxes with about 15 people repeated- and there are bits that are skipped over (the conflict with the shop-owner across the street is all done in about eight seconds) the politicking that got support from every Supervisor except Brolin is ignored, while the entire Diego Luna subplot is poorly rendered- Milk's friends don't like him, he's a tit, he hangs himself. The three people getting the majority of the positive press for this film are director Gus Van Sant, writer Dustin Lance Black and Penn- but only the latter really deserves it. The other two got lots right and some very key things wrong. Pah!
This film is just so bland and non-descript that the things to admire are kind of lost in a mush of mediocrity. The irony is that Harvey Milk's biopic is just too straight and conventional to do justice to a man whose life was anything but. 3/10.
