The start of the spring semester, a less-than-stellar late-fall, early-winter film season, preparing for the beginning of Lost's final season, revisiting Arrested Development, and my recent acquisition of Modern Warfare 2 have all conspired to keep me from posting the last few weeks. But it's merely neglected, not forgotten. So to keep the flame of online amateur film discussion alive (emphasis on the "amateur"), I'll say a few words about one of the better films to come out of this season that I've seen, A Single Man (trailer).
First off, I don't want the post title to give the wrong impression. It makes it sound like I thought the film was the end-all, be-all cinematic event, a life-changing experience through the medium of the motion picture. It was quite good, but it's "singular" only in the sense that it was the first not-so-bad title I thought of after about ten seconds' thought. Well, there goes my journalistic integrity.
On to the film itself. Set in 1962 at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it depicts a day in the life of George Falconer (Colin Firth), a gay English expat teaching literature at a Los Angeles university. To his disillusion with the political condition of America and the world and at the denseness and indifference of most of his student is added his despair after learning that his longtime lover (Matthew Goode) has died in a car accident. He prepares to commit suicide—strangely enough, not only are these preparations played for laughs, but this actually works—but comes across elements of his life that seem to whittle away at his despair: his old friend from London, Charley (Julianne Moore; funny hearing her and Goode, whose character's American, trade accents), a young Spanish hustler (Jon Kortajarena), a handsome, charming, and intelligent student (Nicholas Hoult, the boy from About a Boy), and other small, simple pleasures like a friendly child from the neighborhood and a dog of his favorite breed. Though the initial premise sounds pretty depressing, the film ends up being surprisingly joyful and life-affirming.
The film largely depends on Firth's performance, since he's in every single scene as far as I can remember, and he proves himself to be more than up to the task. Over the course of the film we see the layers that George builds around himself to cope with being both a gay man in 1962 and a bereaved lover slowly stripped away, and Firth accomplishes this so subtly and convincingly you hardly even see it happening until you realize that the man at the end of the film is so different from the one at the beginning. Though I've been aware of Firth for a while, I think the only other leading role I've seen of his was in 2003's Girl with a Pearl Earring. (I never saw the Pride and Prejudice mini-series that brought him to fame, The Importance of Being Earnest, or Love Actually, I don't even remember him in The English Patient or Shakespeare in Love, and through some inexplicable, egregious oversight I haven't seen either of the Bridget Jones films or Mamma Mia!) But I've seen him turn up here and there, and A Single Man makes me really look forward to seeing more of him (though hopefully not sharing the screen with Renée Zellweger).
I was shocked to learn that this was Tom Ford's first film. It's remarkably confident in its patience, simplicity, and delicacy. Even its visual gimmicks, which one often finds in first-time directors eager to make their mark—in this case, the brightening of the film's otherwise faded colors whenever something stirs George's emotions—are subtle and unobrusive. The photography and composition are exquisite; I could see some people being turned off by its being a bit too perfect, like a feature-length Ralph Lauren ad (which makes some sense, given that Ford was head of Gucci), but, as I've said before, I'm a sucker for a pretty movie. Both the fantastic aesthetics of the film and Ford's deft handling of the story, themes, and characters makes me very hopeful that his second career will be as successful as his first in fashion.
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