Hello and welcome to the Slate Culture Gab Fest, the Love Me for Who I Am edition.

This is the Slate Daily podcast for Wednesday, December 3rd.

On today's show, we're going to talk about Gus Van Zant's transcended biopic,

Milk, Beyonce, a force for good or a force for evil, and Black Friday, shop until global capitalism drops.

Dana.

Oh, joining me today are, excuse me, are Dana Stevens, Slate's film critic.

Hello, Dana.

And Julia Turner, Deputy Editor of Slate.

Hi, Steve.

Hi, Julia.

So we all saw Milk.

Dana, before we talk about the politics and the significance of the movie and its possible political and wider cultural valence, let's just talk about it as a movie.

I think you and I both agree.

There's something about the biopic that is itself just a painfully stale genre. And if you just looked at this movie completely dispassionately, you might see it as a stale biopic. And yet it just is not at all. Why is it? Is it the theme of the movie or something about Gus Van Zand's direction or Sean Penn's performance or all of the above? That's a great question. I mean, I think maybe the unique achievement of milk, it's sort of not completely unique, but fairly unique in the biopic genre, is that it weaves those things together so successfully and that it doesn't ever feel as if the issues are now kicking in, you know, or the message is now kicking in, or now we're checking off this box or that box in Harvey Milk's life. He somehow weaves all of those things into this organic movie that, for me at least, just really swept me away to the point that even though I knew more or less what happened to Harvey Milk, not in great detail, but obviously the outline of his story, I still found myself on the edge of my seat at the end when, you know, he's about to be shot by the fellow city commissioner, Dan White, having that classic fiction film feeling of, please don't let

this happen. Please don't let this happen. I don't know how Gus Mansant does it. Absolutely.

And Julia, does it have something to do with the fact that the biopic has become a kind of

rote and sort of po-faced genre, right? It takes itself extremely seriously. And yet Harvey Milk

himself, especially in the person of Sean Penn, has this wonderful kind of openness and generosity and ease and good humor that just flies in the face of that seriousness or self-seriousness.

To my mind, it's Sean Penn who saves this movie and not Gus Fancent.

I mean, there's plenty of, like, schlocky biopic scenes.

I don't, I think it sort of just barely escapes biopicdom.

Well, I realized that you didn't love it as much as we did, but I have to throw in a word and just say, wait a second, Sean Penn does give an incredible performance, but I think he's saying some pretty great words by Dustin Lance Black, who was the writer of the movie, who was also sort of in some ways the generator of this movie, who, you know, sort of went around waving this unpublished script in the air until somebody would finally make it. Oh, I didn't know that story. Yeah, and to me, it really does transcend just the great performance, which has sort of become the biopic standard, right? You have to have the Joaquin Phoenix's, Johnny Cash, right? There has to be like that incredible what's the word impersonation or kind of channeling of a great figure.

...