Milk

I immediately liked it. But as often happens with hyperreflective types like me, some critical reflex kept jerking at a trifle: what does the movie do that a print biography or documentary can't? Why is this story a movie?

Eventually, after long hours spent meditatively stroking my rabbits, the answer came to me: while, like a documentary, it offers representative facts and frames them as an allegory, unlike a documentary, it incarnates what it allegorizes:

While we can never know what is was to be Harvey Milk, to live his experience from the inside, through this very special simulation we can live, by analogy, the principle behind it. Sympathy, Hume predicted, is a universal impulse; when we exercise it, we create the conditions in our own bodies by which another being and another life may flourish.

Sympathy is the human god in us, a sui generis mystery and the singular force by which we transform personae into persons. Part testimony, part homage, and part sacrament, Milk wisely respects its, and our, human fact, and by inviting its audience to share in the privacy and privilege of its art, it embarrasses, as it should, petty critics like me who practice their forgetfulness on objects both wonderful and worth remembering.

Slothrop agrees with the talking gorilla on this one, but remains skeptical. The movie was easily likable, a pleasure to watch--in as much as a tragedy can be enjoyable and easy to watch-- and the story was movingly inspirational. But I'm not sure Koko fully answered his own question. At least, the original questions remains for me unanswered. This is a much better story than a movie; or-- the movie is but in service to the story. Could we have sympathized as much were this story told in print? I think so. Despite Sean Penn's terrific performance, I would have known Harvey Milk more intimately had I read the book (does it exist?) than seen this film. So much is necessarily left out and, through no fault but the fault of the genre of two hour film, flattened. This is not a critique of the movie. Gus Van Sant doesn't screw anything up. But he doesn't add much, in terms of the art of it. I'm grateful, now, for knowing about Harvey Milk because I doubt I would have read the book. But I don't think the vehicle in which this knowledge and sympathy came to me was anywhere as special as the man it depicted.