It was easy to laugh at the Oscars recently, when, after a montage of heart-swelling moments from earnest, socially conscious, liberal-minded pictures about the ills of our society, host Jon Stewart cracked wise, something to the effect of “And America never had those problems again.” Still, I felt a little bad as the balloon of self-importance deflated. Hollywood cranks out so much cholesterol-jammed junk food that the good-for-your-health films that play to our better instincts deserve more than a punchline, even if Stewart’s barb was aimed at the Academy Awards showboating rather than the well-meaning movies.

Milk, which stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the Oscar-winning 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, meets the high-fiber requirement for its genre. The poisonous Proposition 6 of the era in which it is set has given way to Proposition 8, and the combination biopic/issues picture has been positioned as a talking point. But Gus Van Sant, who spent much of the decade on a “death trilogy,” and Sean Penn, not noted for his farcical touch, have approached the picture with as much lightness as possible, and it goes down easily. Harvey Milk was a paranoiac, and the movie is framed by his tape-recorded final musings in case of assassination. But Van Sant resists the temptation toward a quartet, just as Milk held his darker impulses at bay.

The film’s success is largely a matter of Penn giving himself over to his subject’s natural ebullience, which carried him to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1978. Being the first openly gay man voted into major public office in America was no easy climb, and by sticking to the last eight years of Milk’s life Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black show just what it is those much-derided “community activists” do. (more…)