Milk

It's hard, very hard, to review a film when you're crying all the way through it.

Milk had such an emotional impact on me. And it's hard to explain why. It's not really Milk's personal story that is so personal to me. It's our struggle.

I was in my 20's when Dianne Feinstein's mayoral career began, when she was thrust into the spotlight announcing that Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone had been shot and killed. I was in laid-back San Diego at the time, just trying to get my life together. That part of my life wasn't even a part of getting it together; my gay life was hidden in the shadows. I knew it was there, but I just couldn't pay attention to it at the time. So I really didn't know much about Harvey Milk in his time. It's really Feinstein's name I remember from the press.

This is such an eloquently carved movie, from the exquisite screenplay to the bevy of fine performances. Leading that list, of course, is actor Sean Penn, who just inhabits the role. The way he moves his hands, his arms, the way his body swayed. While I don't know Harvey Milk, I feel this is Harvey Milk. Penn is a revelation.

But it doesn't stop there. James Franco as Milk's lover has put in his finest performance in a career that is still just beginning. Emile Hirsch continues to amaze as young political activist Cleve Jones. Is there any role Josh Brolin can't flesh out for us? While we'd like to know more about Dan White and what drove him, we get enough glimpses to make this performance work. And the list goes on for the entire cast list.

The best part about this screenplay is that it puts us in the life and times of the 1970's, when the Castro was just coming into its own. It shows us the flow of that neighborhood, and we meet the Castro's denizens. The movie makes no apologies that these men are constantly staring at the new boys in town. Indeed, Harvey Milk is staring. Milk is no saint. But he's definitely a hero.

And, contrary to much criticism, it's my opinion that the movie starts at just the right spot, which is when Milk reaches the age of 40 and decides to change. And it's a cinematic thrill to watch that change, watch him develop into the persistent politician he became.

What hit me so hard is that this film shows not just the struggle of the men and women in San Francisco some 30 years ago, but a struggle that's very personal to us that continues to this day. The passing of Proposition 8 in California just one month ago brings the issue back to the forefront. As if we could ever believe it left. Milk's work will be remembered as we walk with his banner.

This is one of the best movies of 2008. This is one of the most important movies of my life.

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Into the Wild

Into the Wind is Sean Penn’s vision of the true story of Christopher McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch), a man who, right after graduating from college, gives all the money he has to charity, leaves his middle class life, and heads out for Alaska. He spends 20 months traveling through America, and eventually ends up getting to what constitutes his Walden. The story is very much about the relationships he forms along the way, as well as his physical struggle to survive.

It’s both beautifully and starkly filmed. Penn seems to want to paint McCandless as a newly-born hippie who’s discovering himself in the grandeur of nature, and he carries us along into the gorgeous but treacherous Alaskan wilderness.

The question we ask, we will always ask, is: why would anyone do this? Why would a young American give up a bright future for a homeless life? More to the point, the question is, who is this young man? And that’s the goal of the film: to answer this question. Penn almost pulls it off.

We go in and out of the timeline, as we start off in Alaska, the end of his almost two-year journey, and then flash back often to scenes south of there, as McCandless treks across the U.S. Along the way, he meets people for whom he depends upon sustenance – remember, he has no money – or a job, or a kind word. These people are drawn in reality, and the casting is quite remarkable as we see Vince Vaughn as a combine operator, Hal Holbrook as a lonely old man who gives McCandless a hand, and several others who really inhabit their roles. Some inhabit their roles because they’re real people, like Alaskan Jim Gallien, whom we see in an early scene when he gives the boy some boots to protect his feet.

The parents don’t come off as well. This story seems more about what this young man is running from rather than to. When asked about “oppressive” forces in nature, he says, with disdain, “parents.” Marcia Gay Harden seems a little to caricaturish in her portrayal as his mother, but William Hurt is starkly true. His eyebrows tell the entire story in a restaurant after graduation when some young revelers walk in.

So who is this young man? He’s someone who thinks he can survive even though life hasn’t given him any training. He doesn’t really seek risk as much as stumble upon it, and we watch, grimacing, as he makes one stupid mistake after another: abandoning his wool cap on a tree, shooting a moose with a .22 rifle, unable to preserve the meat long enough to eat it, ignoring the local sheriff's advice and taking his kayak onto a raging river.

He’s stupid, ignorant, unprepared, and proud of it. It’s hard to have respect for a man who blunders into situations repeatedly for which he has no way to cope. And yet, director/screenwriter Penn asks us to feel for this man, over and over, as the camera and dialogue set him up almost as a Jesus figure, and certainly as a newfound hippie seeking answers in the unspoiled wilderness.

But I was constantly reminded that this is a man who accepts no responsibility in life. In truth, I didn’t feel any sympathy at all for McCandless and his life of blunders. I feel sorry for those people who aided him, gave him a job even when he was unskilled, government workers who bent the rules a little bit to help him out, those who gave him food and shelter when they had little to spare. And he paid each of them back by leaving them. The most heart-wrenching of these moments takes place when the old man (played wonderfully by best actor nominee Hal Holbrook) gives him his heart only to have it handed back to him abruptly. People keep knocking at his emotional door, but there's nobody home.

They say the most selfish of humans is one who commits suicide. Add to that list a young man who seeks his dream of living in the wild but who sucks the life out of those around him so that he can achieve that dream.

The story is riveting. The fact that it’s true make it even moreso. The cinematography is breaktaking. The narration switches between McCandless and his sister, a brilliant device for bringing us into the story, and underlining the tragedy that is about to happen. While I question the motives of a young man who goes “into the wild,” the movie and the character's choices certainly make for interesting discussion.

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