Philadelphia Weekly

Playing the title role in Milk, director Gus Van Sant's rousing, shockingly accessible salute to slain civil rights leader Harvey Milk, Sean Penn does something we haven't seen him do in years.

He smiles.

Don't get me wrong. I think Penn's a genius. But he's also kind of a miserable bastard, brilliantly burrowing deep into Method madness, all hunched over, mumbling tortured Brando-isms beneath dark clouds of cigarette smoke and despair. Even cashing a Hollywood paycheck in a dopey thriller like The Interpreter, Penn played his first bona fide action hero as a depressed alcoholic mourning his dead, unfaithful wife. If only for his own sake, you wish this dude would lighten up a bit.

Which is why Penn's first few scenes in Milk crackle with a sense of rediscovery. As San Francisco's cherished local legend--the first openly gay man ever elected to a public office in America--his Harvey Milk is a buoyant, expansive figure. As droll as he is shrewd, the character is delightful to watch. The real Harvey Milk's lanky stance, queeny mannerisms and honking Noo Yawk accent aren't just fodder for a typical Oscar-friendly dead celebrity impression--they're pushing this actor out of his gloomy old comfort zones. There's such a feeling of playfulness and joy in this performance, I dare say Sean Penn hasn't been this much fun to watch since Fast Times at Ridgemont High or at the very least Carlito's Way.

Milk's screenplay, penned by Big Love writer Dustin Lance Black, is fairly standard stuff. In tried and true end-of-year biopic fashion, we watch as Harvey Milk rallies the electorate from his Castro Street camera shop, serving as ringleader and de facto den mother to a rowdy gang of persecuted Lost Boys. But he's a natural-born politician, seeing strength in numbers and growing keenly aware of the ways commerce will always trump bigotry. ("You don't mind all these homosexuals shopping at your liquor store, do you sir?" he asks a formerly outspoken homophobe during an early moment of triumph.)

For a movie that's stalled in and out of development for decades, Milk lands at a surprisingly serendipitous moment. After all, here's the tale of a minority community organizer who rises to an unprecedented office, overcoming all sorts of intolerance by sheer force of his unique charisma and peerless political savvy. If all that weren't eerie enough, a fair chunk of the film's second hour is devoted to battling a shitty California ballot proposition that discriminates against gays.

Eight years ago director Gus Van Sant turned his back on Hollywood, and ever since then has been devoting himself to lyrical tone poems like Gerry, Last Days and this past February's Paranoid Park. Languorous, lovely and more than a little obtuse, these are difficult films for discerning audiences. Milk is quite the opposite--funny, familiar and broadly entertaining, even while boasting plenty of Van Sant's signature flourishes.

Still, the film has ruffled feathers in certain hard-core cineaste circles, most of whom have dubbed it "disappointingly conventional" for an artist of Van Sant's rarefied caliber. (As if a mainstream, populist entertainment in which all the main characters are flamboyant homosexuals somehow constitutes "selling out.")

But such grousing willfully ignores the keen visual intelligence that the director and his longtime cinematographer Harris Savides bring to Black's occasionally prosaic screenplay. Check out how Milk always looms large at the center of the frame in his boisterous Castro District neighborhood, vs. the later City Hall sequences placing Penn in cramped corners of the screen, dwarfed by the enormous government architecture surrounding him. This is extremely smart filmmaking, externalizing the character's relative stature by expressing it through his surroundings.

Furthermore, it's hard to fathom how Harvey Milk's life story might benefit from the cryptic delirium treatment Van Sant gave Kurt Cobain in Last Days. Milk is nothing if not an impassioned plea for tolerance and acceptance, and as such, logic dictates that the film should play as a conventional crowd-pleaser.

Like the inclusive American ideals its hero so staunchly advocates, this movie is open to everybody.