Movie Review: A Single Man

THREE THINGS I LIKED:

1. COLIN FIRTH PROBABLY WOULD HAVE EARNED THAT BEST ACTOR NOMINATION JUST FOR ONE SCENE — Based on Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel, Firth plays George Falconer, a Los Angeles-area college English professor who is grieving the loss of Jim (Matthew Goode), his lover of 16 years. In the movie's most powerful scene, Firth unforgettably displays the sorrow he's forced to repress after learning of Jim's death and then being informed that services are "family only." There's an enormous amount of pain Firth manages to put into his two word response: "Of course."
   
2. JULIANNE MOORE, NATIONAL TREASURE — I'm not so sure how much I would've bought into a character like Charley, George's lush of a divorcee friend with whom he had a sexual past in his youth. But as Moore has had a habit of doing throughout her career, she makes even the least likable role somehow appealing. Thankfully it's her night of boozing with George and a careless comment that allows Firth to have another memorable display of emotion that the film had been needing pretty badly. I don't know when she's going to get her Oscar, but I feel comfortable saying it's overdue at this point.
   
3. THE THERE AND NOW — Not to be confused with Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man (review on that forthcoming), which is also set in the 1960s, I'd say Tom Ford's effort was more successful at recreating the time in which the film is set. Indeed, beyond the Cuban Missile Crisis dominating the news of the time in the film, that phone call and that night with Charley—who still seems to think things can, you know, "work" for her and George—effectively captures a time in America when very few even dared to imagine life outside the closet.
   

THREE THINGS I DIDN'T:

1. NOT TO SOUND TOO MUCH LIKE A FOX NEWS ANCHOR, BUT I DON'T CARE WHAT THE DIRECTOR SAYS; IT'S A FILM MADE BY THE GAY MAN, FOR THE GAY MAN — In addition to the Best Actor Firth received for the film at Venice, A Single Man also took home the Queer Lion. Still, Ford actually insists that despite him being a gay director funding a movie about a gay man based on a novel by a gay author that, of course, "this is not a gay film." It's just coincidence then that so many bare-ass shots found their way into the film as well as so many of the young men George run into throughout the movie resemble models in magazine ads. But ultimate shame falls on on Ford—presumably some time shortly after he sold the project to The Weinstein Company—for following the safer Oscar marketing route of publicly downplaying a rather obvious aspect of the film he'd probably accept praise for privately were it not for having to publicly pander to notoriously homophobic Academy voters.
   
2. SHALLOW ON BOTH ENDS — As far as artistic flourishes go, too much is never enough for Ford. And even the slowest members of the audience aren't going to have too much trouble catching on to the metaphorical use of color and how the director uses it to hammer home those momentary glimpses of beauty George experiences over the course of his day. Truly a case where less could have been more, Ford goes over the top in his attempts to create beautiful imagery so often that I found myself beginning to crack up at moments I'm fairly sure were not intended to be humorous. George's relationship with a student named Kenny (Nicholas Hoult) struck me as not only a predictable element of erotic fantasy, but also achingly familiar.
   
3. ARE WE THERE YET? — I'd typically be attracted to movies that focus merely on limited time frames such as the single day a A Single Man is trying to cover (it involves the periodic flashback, obviously), but pick up the pace a bit. Aside from the two scenes I initially mentioned, the movie trudges through just about every other moment in a way I can only describe as frustratingly lethargic. The running time is around 100 minutes, but the film sure felt like it took more than two hours to arrive at its rather unsatisfying conclusion.
   

25 WORDS OR LESS:

Firth and Moore provide the most genuine moments of a movie otherwise awash in excessively attempted visual artistry.