Milk (2008) DVD

After nearly 20 years locked in development purgatory, Gus Van Sant finally brings this biopic of US politician Harvey Milk, an activist who served as a figurehead for the gay rights movement of the 1970s, to the screen. The film charts eight years of Milk’s life, which had taken him from New York to become the proprietor of a photography store in San Francisco, where he enjoyed a meteoric rise in politics from community organiser through to city officialdom, before his tragic assassination in 1978.

Sean Penn’s Academy Award is well deserved here, as he throws himself into the role and is totally convincing as Milk. The period detail is also note perfect, with Van Sant making good use of filmic trickery – including some stunning blink and you’ll miss it whip pans – to blend archive and newsreel footage with his own cinematography. This places the film firmly in its time, but also serves to blur the boundaries between fiction and fact, past and present, a contrivance intended to inspire action through the clear parallels between California’s Proposition Six, a bill opposed by Milk which proposed the banning of homosexual teachers from working in public schools, through to the more recent Proposition Eight, the Golden State’s much more recent referendum on gay marriage. Little has changed, Van Sant proclaims, with a scene in the film which calls for individuals to rise above their apathy and engage in politics by “coming out of the bar and into the street” – a message as relevant then as it is today.