Director Gus Van Sant's recent forays into European-inflected art-minimalism have met with much critical acclaim, but there's something about those films that still bugs me. With movies like "Elephant," about the Columbine High massacre, or "Last Days," exploring the death of Nirvana singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain, it seemed like Van Sant was deliberately choosing hot-button, generation-defining events, and then making the most evasive, marginal films possible about them.
Notably, the "why?" question, which loomed so large over both these events, was entirely ignored by the filmmaker, almost aggressively so, as if showing Cobain shuffling around the woods near his Seattle home in real-time was somehow more illuminating than addressing the issues of illness and disillusion with success that actually plagued the grunge icon.
Fortunately, Van Sant — who I admire greatly, even if he does drive me nuts sometimes — tossed this approach for "Milk," his biopic on San Francisco organizer and politician Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States, who was assassinated by disgruntled city assemblyman Dan White in 1979. Central to the movie is asking "why?": Why did Milk decide to stand up for gays, and why was he killed for it?