Milk Hits, Earns Raves Across the Board

Pete Travers gives the film four stars, writing:

Milk is Van Sant’s best film, which is saying a lot, since his generous intelligence and unforced grace shine through whether he’s sailing the mainstream (Good Will Hunting, To Die For) or riding riskier indie currents (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Elephant). Van Sant means for his film to strike a personal chord, whether Harvey is talking a closeted teen out of suicide or talking himself into keeping up the fight when his own love life is crumbling. Harvey’s words ‚Äî “You gotta give ’em hope” ‚Äî are carved into a bust of the populist hero that went up in May in a rotunda of San Francisco’s City Hall. The movie is a more fitting memorial. It brings Harvey to life for a new generation instead of setting him in stone. Penn makes Harvey so vivid and spoiling to be heard that you want to introduce him to people. John McCain, meet a real maverick.

The NY Times AO Scott writes:

“Milk‚Äù is a fascinating, multi-layered history lesson. In its scale and visual variety it feels almost like a calmed-down Oliver Stone movie, stripped of hyperbole and Oedipal melodrama. But it is also a film that like Mr. Van Sant‚Äôs other recent work ‚Äî and also, curiously, like David Fincher‚Äôs ‚ÄúZodiac,‚Äù another San Francisco-based tale of the 1970s ‚Äî respects the limits of psychological and sociological explanation.

Dan White, Milk’s erstwhile colleague and eventual assassin, haunts the edges of the movie, representing both the banality and the enigma of evil. Mr. Brolin makes him seem at once pitiable and scary without making him look like a monster or a clown. Motives for White’s crime are suggested in the film, but too neat an accounting of them would distort the awful truth of the story and undermine the power of the movie.

That power lies in its uncanny balancing of nuance and scale, its ability to be about nearly everything — love, death, politics, sex, modernity — without losing sight of the intimate particulars of its story. Harvey Milk was an intriguing, inspiring figure. “Milk” is a marvel.

Roger Ebert gives the film four stars and says this of Penn:

Sean Penn amazes me. Not long before seeing “Milk,” I viewed his work in “Dead Man Walking” again. Few characters could be more different, few characters could seem more real. He creates a character with infinite attention to detail, and from the heart out. Here he creates a character who may seem like an odd bird to mainstream America and makes him completely identifiable. Other than the occasional employment of Harvey Milk’s genitals, what makes this character different? Some people may argue there is a gay soul but I believe we all share the same souls.

The list of raves goes on and on. More on Metacritic