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Just in time for your office Oscar picks is our long overdue Milk review; lets get right to it. Gus Van Sant’s Milk has all the makings of a cinematic masterwork: a transcendent lead actor with Sean Penn as the late Harvey Milk, epic scale, an operatic score and stunning direction and cinematography. The one thing that perhaps could stop Milk from being a legendary cinematic achievement is that this film is a partially recycled and dramatized version of the 1985 Academy Award winning documentary, The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. While standing on its own as an amazing and engrossing motion picture, Milk also adds to the irritating modern trend of taking a well-crafted, inspiring, rousing documentary and scripting it out for mass audience [Notorious, Lords of Dogtown, although Milk is on a completely different plane from the aforementioned films]: this perhaps leads to a not so stunning revelation that American audiences need their history dramatized to really grasp the realities that surround them.

So what does Milk offer audiences that its documentary counterpart cannot; what does this work add to the conversation of Harvey Milk or queer civil rights? First and foremost there is depth; characters and settings are rigorously and earnestly developed and explored beyond their mediated scope and in this film it works. Director Van Sant immerses the viewer into the 1970s Castro district of San Francisco and into the motivations and actions of Harvey. This epic civil rights leader becomes a dynamic character if not totally human: he neglects his lovers, is self conscious and critical yet he can rally tens of thousands of people for a single cause. Finally, in this day in age of queer civil rights, the film reminds us that any common man, woman or transgender can rise to the role of civil rights leader and change history. This film reminds us through a dramatized medium that our heroes are, at their core, human.