There are a lot of different reasons to see and enjoy a film.  A great perfomance.  A moving story.  Innovative camera work.  Beautiful scenery.  Clever dialogue.  Occassionally, the creative team behind the production manages to put a few of these elements together and you get a great movie.  Milk, in my estimation, comes up short.

My beef is almost entirely with the format: I really don’t like biopics.  They are, almost by definition, formulaic.  I think that was part of the point they were trying to make in Walk Hard, but the format is so burdensome it bogged down the whole enterprise.  These things generally come out to good reviews and they are money come award season (Reese Witherspoon and Forest Whitaker, just in the last few years), but I don’t think they stand the test of time.  Take a look at AFI’s most recent Top 100 Movies list.  How many of these are biopics?  Citizen Kane, even though it’s fictional, but it’s presence has more to do with revoluationary camera work than story (confession: I find it to be something of a bore).  Raging Bull, I guess, though that’s more of a psychological study.  That’s it.  It’s a genre that just doesn’t allow for great film-making.

Now, that being said, Milk is totally worth seeing.  First, because I think a lot of people are unfamiliar with the historical figure and he deserves attention.  I’d rather everybody just see this tremendous documentary (a much more effective way to tell these kinds of stories), but if this is how you’re introduced to Harvey Milk, well, I’ll live.  Second, Sean Penn is really good.  He deserves the Oscar nomination he’ll get.  The rest of the cast, particularly the suddenly unstoppable Josh Brolin, holds up their end of the bargain, although it was too bad to see James Franco stuck in the lame duck/jilted lover role that would have gone to Diane Lane or Kathleen Quinlan if this were a hetero-joint.  I recently blitzed through Freeks and Geeks on DVD and Franco deserves some good roles in the future (and not just as a stoner). 

Mr. Penn has caught some flack recently for his visits to Venezuela and Cuba and his seemingly chummy relationships with Hugo Chavez and Castro.  In particular, some people in the gay community were unhappy with him for championing a gay-rights hero like Harvey Milk, while supporting dictators who flagrantly violate human rights (gay and straight).  I don’t have a strong opinion here yet, though I certainly understand why people would be upset.  It will be interesting to see if Penn’s politics, perhaps like Tom Cruise’s religious views, ends up negatively affecting his film career.