Bottom Line: Sensitive and stylish, Tom Ford appeals beyond gay
audiences.
Designer Tom Ford makes a surprisingly successful leap from the
fashion industry to the big screen with "A Single Man," a standout
directing debut about a gay college professor who loses his longtime
partner. The theme of the search for meaning after a great loss is
developed with great sensitivity, thanks to Colin Firth's moving
performance in the main role, and should help the film go beyond gay
audiences, who will be its strong supporters, to attract the more
mainstream attention of "Brokeback Mountain" and "Far From Heaven."
Based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood, the screenplay by
Ford and David Scearce is concise and to the point. It opens on a
fatal car crash in 1962, in which Jim (Matthew Goode) is killed.
George Falconer (Firth) learns about his lover's death the next day
when a relative phones, but he is warned not to attend the funeral
of the man he lived with for 16 years.
Broken-hearted and
alone, he seeks comfort from his long-ago flame, now friend, Charley
(Julianne Moore), who is obviously still in love with him. But
George is too devastated to be interested in either sex, and even
rebuffs the approach of a hot young hustler played by Jon
Kortajarena, who is a true James Dean lookalike. He tries to avoid
getting involved with his student Kenny (Nicholas Hoult of "About a
Boy"), who is just discovering his sexual preferences and
aggressively courts the older man. Instead, he makes plans for
committing suicide.
Most of the action takes place over the
course of a single day in Los Angeles in the early '60s, when being
gay was socially disapproved of by many. The film brushes ever so
lightly on the issue of discrimination, first implicitly, when
George lectures his students on how society fears what it is not,
and later in a beautifully calibrated tete-a-tete between George and
Charley, when she insinuates George and Jim did not have a "real
relationship."
Through snatches of their life together, it is
apparent that George and Jim had a very real and loving relationship
whatever 1960's America thought. Their love story is contrasted with
the next-door neighbors, who are down-to-earth suburbanites busy
raising families and building nuclear bomb shelters. When a
colleague tells George there won't be time for sentiment when the
bomb falls, George characteristically retorts that he's not
interested in living in a world without feeling.
Firth's
measured performance, delivered in a clipped British accent, has
just the right restraint, and the intelligent dialogue is a
pleasure. Moore is glamorous and likeable as the alcoholic divorcee
Charley, adrift without a husband. Goode and especially Hoult are
just too perfect to be true, but they serve the purpose of offering
George good reasons to stay alive.
In contrast to Firth's
underplaying, the directing has its overblown, operatic soul. Ford
is unafraid of such cringe-worthy moments as playing an opera solo
over a suicide attempt, or having a nattily dressed symbolic figure
in Tom Ford Menswear give the kiss of death to the recently
departed.
In the same spirit, tech work is satisfyingly
bold. Dan Bishop's stylish production design and Eduard Grau's
cinematography set the film in a romantically idealized '60s world.
The film score, written by Abel Korzeniowski and Shigeru Umebayashi,
is variegated and full of lush orchestral themes that salute
Hitchcock and Bernard Hermann, among others.
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