Lapping Up Milk

Have you guys seen Milk yet? Wow.

I generally find more to like than not in theatres stage or film, so you can take my criticism with that in mind, but Favorite Daughter and I were just blown away by this one today at our local art house. This sure isn’t the cross between made-for-tv docudrama and blatant screed I was braced for.

Extraordinary. It was entertainment, education, time travel almost for me. And enlightenment.

In places it reminded us of women’s suffrage in America, particularly as we saw that history in “Iron-Jawed Angels.”

I’m not a Sean Penn fan (well, I wasn’t but this is REALLY something.) I never was an Anita Bryant fan either, even being from Florida and remembering her as our official “orange juice” spokesmodel. Favorite Daughter had never heard of her but certainly has a strong opinion now. Watching the film and thinking about it later, I now find Bryant’s “Save Our Children” bigotry much more ominous and offensive than I did when I was, well, politically not much more than a child myself.

In fairness (not that she deserves it) Wikipedia suggests Bryant repented some years later, good power of story because apparently her epiphany arose when she fell victim to her own patriarchal fundamentalism:

Her marriage to Bob Green failed at that time, and in 1980 she divorced him, although he reportedly has said that his fundamentalist religious beliefs do not recognize civil divorce and that she is still his wife in God’s eyes. Kathie Lee Gifford, who worked as a live-in secretary/babysitter for the Greens in the early 1970s [figures!] said in her autobiography that Green had a ferocious temper and could be very possessive and emotionally abusive, and that Anita was not very happy.

Some Christian audiences and venues shunned her after her divorce. No longer invited to appear at their events, she lost a major source of income. With her four children, she moved from Miami to Selma, Alabama, and later to Atlanta, Georgia. In a 1980 Ladies Home Journal article she said, “The church needs to wake up and find some way to cope with divorce and women’s problems.”

In the same article, she said that she felt sorry for all of the anti-gay things she had said and done during her campaigns. She said that she had adopted a more “live and let live” attitude.

Bankruptcy in three different states ensued. Humbling indeed, or so you’d think. But this Tulsa news story from 2007 suggests she might not have learned much after all, and that she’s just another uneducated celebrity who opens her mouth to channel catch phrases with no coherent thought, like OJ Simpson always sounds like he’s doing. Well, enough about her.

Btw, there’s a whole behind-the-camera Harvey Milk story to go with the onscreen story, about several failed attempts over many years to get the right script, and finally a kid who himself had been inspired by Harvey Milk’s life and advocacy spent two years interviewing his family and friends to get the (forgive me) “straight” scoop so he could tell it that way, as a story about warm, real people to care about and connect with while they were alive, rather than some kind of sleazy sensationalistic political crime drama and murder trial.

We did leave 13-year-old Young Son at home this afternoon though, with his bagpipes and videogames and giant Christmas coffee table book, Maps of War. Good call. Hairspray was enough of a history-hits-home eye-opener for him this year, and despite the underlying civil rights bedrock of both, there’s NO comparison in those two movies! 🙂

Tomorrow we may see “Doubt” with Meryl Streep in the creepy Anita Bryant-like role, near as I can tell, at the same art house. And the foreign language school story that won at Cannes this year is coming in the spring, that looks like it’ll be a French To Sir With Love. (FavD is studying college French this year and will see Paris for herself soon after she sees this film.)

It’s called “The Class” and you can check out its official website.

So to bring this post full-circle, part of Milk involved schoolteachers too, as targets of the religious right (I think Anita Bryant called it the “Normal Majority” in one clip, shudder) and guess who was the president of the jury personally awarding the Palme d’Or at Cannes to the teenagers who play the tough multicultural students of The Class?
Harvey Milk, er, Sean Penn.