A Single Man

** ½ 


A Moment of Pretense

        
          Colin Firth has been acting in films and television for nearly 30 years.  Like many actors before him, Firth has had to endure an unreasonable legacy of typecasting.  He has made his career out of playing a young, suave, handsome Brit, and whether he personified good or evil, it mattered not: his role remained the same. With his latest performance in A Single Man, however, all of his earlier potential has finally burst wide open.  It is all the more a shame then that his breakthrough performance had to come through the pretentious mess that is A Single Man.

          Directed through the longwinded vision of fashion icon Tom Ford, A Single Man is an ostentatious string of visuals, with a screenplay thrown in the mix.  Tom Ford is a famous American fashion designer, and A Single Man is his directorial debut in film.  It is an ambitious debut, and a deeply personal film at that.  Thanks to Ford’s extensive background in fashion design (and photography), A Single Man runs rampant with visual flair and expressionistic tones.  If this film had been made as sheer avant-garde, it might very well have been a masterpiece.  However, Ford made a haphazard attempt to balance his unique visual style with that of a lazy semblance of script and plot.  Simply put, his attempt fell flat.

          Aside from of all of his pompous close-ups and jarring editing, Ford (in collaboration with first-time screenwriter David Scearce) decided to adapt Christopher Isherwood’s 2001 novel A Single Man.  The film’s story centers on the character of George (Colin Firth) and his inability to cope with the accidental death of his former lover Jim (Matthew Goode).  George is an English professor at a university in 1962 Los Angeles, and has no choice but to keep his closet homosexuality a secret.  Like many gay men of that time period, George kept the status quo by involving himself with a female lover.  This lover (Charley, played by Julianne Moore) was more like a best friend to George; in fact, besides Charley, George did not have many friends at all, if any.  Firth did the best he could with Ford’s meager script, and helped transform George’s tight-lipped loneliness into something more universal in its understanding of anguish.

        
          If it weren’t for the exquisite performance of Colin Firth, A Single Man would have been as lifeless as a coffin.  This is particularly unfortunate, since Ford was trying to illuminate the notion of living life in ‘the moment’.  In order to cinematically reflect this philosophical outlook, Ford used many gratuitous close-ups, and, with the help of his editor Joan Sobel, applied a disorienting style of editing.  The result ended up looking forced and over-the-top, and only served to alienate the audience from its desired message.  There is one scene in particular which best highlights the indulgence of Ford’s storytelling technique.  It takes place in a jam-packed parking lot, as George engages in a conversation with a stranger whom he had just recently met.  The topics of the conversation vary from the profound to the mundane in a matter of seconds, and seem wholly improbable as mere introduction banter.  The worst part of this scene, however, has nothing to do with the unrealistic dialogue, but more with its baseless use of background space.  For some reason (or better yet no reason), the two men spend the bulk of their conversation in front of a massive billboard of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.  Oooooooooo...very symbolic!  Yes, Tom Ford, we understand: you are a very cultured man indeed.

          Once again, the saddest part of this movie lies in the fact that a truly wonderful performance was nearly lost in its cluttered spectacle.  Colin Firth helped as best he could, through bringing an emotional balance to the film’s cold intellectualism.  But in the end, even Firth’s unspoken words couldn’t trump the film’s vanity.  Firth’s performance is nothing short of poetic, and richly deserves an Oscar nomination.  Firth was, in every sense of the word, A Single Man.  Even when the film tailed off into overwrought sentimentality, Firth held his ground.  Instead of acting as the film’s emotional catharsis, the ending was laughable in its unwarranted sappiness.  If the movie had been more emotionally conscious leading up to its climax, then perhaps the ending might have been more powerful.  Instead, for much of the picture, Ford trapped his characters inside a model shoot-like box, when all they really wanted to do was live.