Milk
Directed by Gus Van Sant. Written by Dustin Lance Black. With Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, Diego Luna, James Franco, and Alison Pill. (R)

Midway through Gus Van Sant’s moving and tender Milk, its subject—Harvey Milk, our country’s first openly gay man elected to office—reveals the sad history of his romantic life. “I’ve had four relationships in my life,” he tells fellow City Supervisor Dan White, “and three of them tried to commit suicide.” Milk, who lived the first four decades of his life in the closet, goes on to explain that gay rights isn’t just the political issue many think it is. “This is our lives we’re fighting for,” he says.

Soon after, White would put five bullets into Harvey Milk.

Milk may not have known that White would be his killer, but he had no illusions about the risk he ran. Death threats were common over the course of his pioneering career in politics, and not long before his death he recorded a political “last testament” that he said was “to be played only in the event of my death by assassination.” Van Sant uses the creation of that tape as a framing device over the course of the film, intermittently returning to Milk alone at his kitchen table with a microphone. It’s a quiet and effective touch, and one that reminds us of Milk’s courage and generosity of spirit—here is a man who, armed with the knowledge that others want him dead, does not run or hide, but finds a way to turn their hatred to further his cause and help those they would harm.

When we first meet him, Milk (Sean Penn) is still a closeted insurance salesman in New York. It’s his fortieth birthday, and he picks up a cute guy in the subway to help him celebrate. That cute guy is Scott (James Franco with a perm), and what starts out as a one-night stand becomes a relationship. Inspired by Scott and tired of living a secret life, Milk soon gives up his job and the pair move to San Francisco to live as an openly gay couple.

As a hippie businessman, Milk opens a camera shop in the Castro. Before long his outsize personality turns the store into an de facto community center for the local gay community. The Castro in those days was a different place, one that still retained much of its working-class Irish history, and the influx of gay life wasn’t always met with open arms. One of the film’s most enlightening aspects is that it makes clear how Milk built his political power by being a smart businessman. It’s difficult to imagine an openly gay candidate being backed by the Teamsters Union, but Milk did it three decades ago by spearheading a boycott of (the non-union) Coors in the area’s gay bars.

After several failed runs for office, Milk is finally voted in after voting laws are changed to allow residents to elect candidates from their own districts. But Milk’s political ambitions take a toll, and by the time of his election Scott has left, worn thin by the years of campaigning. Milk’s next boyfriend—the boozy Jack Lira—doesn’t have much of a taste for politics, and is largely ignored in favor of Harvey’s family of political aides. Headed up by Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch), they’re a ragtag bunch of accidental activists drawn together by Milk’s charisma.

Surprisingly, the greatest political struggle in Milk isn’t about the election. It’s about Proposition 6, a statewide initiative to strip civil rights from gay teachers and their supporters. Backed by singer and spokesmodel Anita Bryant (who had helped get rights protection repealed in other states), it called for the mandatory firing of all gay and lesbian workers in the public school system.

For Milk, it’s a wake-up call; convinced that the closet is a cage, he urges everyone to come out to their families and friends. “If they know us,” he says, “they don’t vote against us.” It’s a message that resonates strongly today, in the wake of the recent passage of Proposition 8 in California.

As a cautious friend turned killer, Josh Brolin is deceptively simple; his White isn’t a raging murderer, but a detached and marginalized man who somehow sees his actions as justified. As Harvey, Sean Penn gives his best performance in years; it’s astonishing to see him so completely disappear into Milk’s lithe physicality. We’ve grown used to seeing Penn play rough-around-the-edges characters, people whose stillness and intensity command attention; here he’s more open than ever, constantly pulling people into his orbit, and every motion Penn makes reflects that. It’s the best kind of acting—the kind that makes you forget what it is.

 

Slumdog Millionaire
Directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan. Written by Simon Beaufoy, based on the novel by Vikas Swarup. With Dev Patel, Anil Kapoor, Irfan Khan, Freida Pinto, Madhur Mittal, Saurabh Shukla, and Ankur Vikal. (R)

Danny Boyle is a director who seems to enjoy trying new things. His 1996 heroin-picaresque Trainspotting put him on the map in the U.S., and he’s followed it up with a big budget flop (The Beach), a post-apocalyptic zombie flick (28 Days Later), a family morality tale (Millions), and an arty sci-fi thriller (Sunshine).

With Slumdog Millionaire, he teams up with Indian director Loveleen Tandan to create a vibrant, kinetic fairy tale of a film that mixes a Dickensian orphan story with the eye-popping visuals of Bollywood and the fast-paced violence of a Hong Kong action picture.

When the film opens, Jamal (Dev Patel) is one question away from winning it all on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?. That an orphan from the slums could know so much seems unlikely; how, we are asked, did Jamal make it so far? Is he a cheat, a genius, or just lucky? Or is it, as the film suggests, that “It is written?”

The local cops certainly think they know the answer; when the film opens, they’re working Jamal over with fists, feet and a car battery, trying to get him to confess to cheating. He won’t—he can’t—and while he’s in custody the film jumps back in time, first to the game show and then further back, showing us Jamal’s history. It’s a structure that recalls the twisting narrative of The Usual Suspects, where most of the action has already happened when the film begins and it’s up to us as an audience to put the pieces together.

In this case, that action is a full lifetime. After the violent death of their mother, young brothers Jamal and Salim are taken in by Maman, a Fagin-like character who runs what he calls an orphanage; in reality it’s a training ground for young beggars and prostitutes. When Jamal shows promise as a singer, Maman plots to blind him on the theory that blind singers make twice as much in alms. Though he escapes that fate, his life remains one of hardship, where every small bit of hope seems to be followed by a beating.

Also taken by Maman is Latika, a young woman whom Jamal loves in that eternal, star-crossed way that exists specifically in Indian films. That Boyle largely makes it work—the couple is first separated near age seven—is a testament to his storytelling. (His frequently stunning visuals—from above, even the slums are beautiful patchworks of color—help him along.) As he scrambles to find Latika, Jamal moves from job to job, eventually landing work as a “chai wallah” at a call center, where he learns how to get on the television show.

Does it all make sense? Not particularly. But it doesn’t make sense in the way that Oliver Twist doesn’t make sense, and that’s a good thing. Who wants to walk out of a theater thinking, “Yes, that was perfectly plausible,” when you could walk out in wonder?

It happens every year: you’re on your way to see the family, car filled with gifts, and you realize you’ve forgotten someone. Fear not! Pick up one of these Christmas movies—not only will it make a fine gift, but it will give everyone something to do when the holiday conversation dries up.

For anyone over 35, A Christmas Story is the go-to holiday film. The story of young Ralphie Parker’s quest for a Red Ryder BB gun, the film has become such a part of our December tradition that television stations are given over to playing it—and only it—on Christmas Day. Over two decades have passed since its release, but it’s so memorable that it continues to inspire merchandising tie-ins. That fishnet-clad leg lamp you see pop up in drugstores every year? It’s a major award.

For Will Ferrell fans, Elf offers a sweet holiday tale without the gallons of sweat and body hair that course through most of the actor’s films. An orphan raised as an overgrown elf at the North Pole, Buddy (Ferrell) travels to New York to find his dad, a gruff businessman played by James Caan. One of the chief strengths of the movie is its great cast, with Zooey Deschanel as the girl who captures Buddy’s heart, Bob Newhart as Papa Elf, Leon Redbone as a snowman, and Ed Asner as the man in the red hat.

If you want something a touch darker, try Tim Burton’s animated The Nightmare Before Christmas, a gothic tale about what happens when Pumpkin King Jack Skellington tires of running Halloween and decides to take over Christmas. For the truly out there, though, there’s no matching Christmas on Mars, a candy-colored phantasmagoria about a group of colonists on the red planet. Here is a film—with its suicides, its Martian Santa Claus, its genital-shaped marching band—that will surely get conversation going again.

Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.