The problem with biographical movies is trust.  Are we seeing an accurate portrayal of a person's life and the times in which he lives?  Or are we seeing political propoganda on celluloid? 

Unfortunately, the genre has been damaged by Oliver Stone whose JFK and Nixon bare little resemblance to the actual events they purport to document.  So as I watched Milk, the life of the first openly gay politician Harvey Milk, I wondered throughout if I was seeing an accurate historical record.  Or did director Gus Van Sant have an agenda?   After viewing the film I researched through Google and YouTube the life of Mr. Milk.  That's the beauty of bio-pics involving figures of recent times; there's a video record of the actual events.  In the case of Milk, the recreations are uncannily similar to the real events.  In fact, a 1984 documentary Times of Harvey Milk is a superior retelling of Mr. Milk's story.

What Van Sant didn't succeed at is the discrimination of the times and how it affected the gay population.  Yes, there's the stabbing of a gay man in a rundown San Francisco neighborhood and complaints that the police didn't come to their defense, but not much else to feel an overwhelming sense of injustice that created the movement.

Sean Penn is extraordinary as Harvey Milk.  While viewing the film I had to remind myself that this is the same actor who starred as a killer on Death Row in Dead Man Walking, a grieving father in Mystic River and who perfectly balanced comedy and tragedy in Woody Allen's underrated Sweet and Lowdown.  In another actor's hands, the role of Harvey Milk could have been turned into camp.  Penn is the Marlon Brando of our times.

Whether Milk captures the full life of the man may be impossible to know, but Penn -- more than the director's skills -- captures the essence of Harvey Milk's political life if not the times of the gay rights movement.  Believability at the expense of agenda is also a concern.  A film maker decides what he or she wants to exclude as well as include in a two to three hour film.  For example, the violence and fires after the Dan White verdict (voluntary manslaughter) are ignored; instead we see only the peaceful demonstrations, which are designed -- it seems -- to pull at our heartstrings instead of giving a complete history of the times.   Milk is also diminished by the aforementioned and superior 1984 documentary.

Call it skepticism, but Hollywood has only itself to blame.  Milk, on the back of Sean Penn's performance, gets a 7 on a 10-scale.

What did you think of the movie?