LITTLE ROCK — Maybe the harshest criticism that can be legitimately leveled at Tom Ford’s remarkable debut movie A Single Man is that it looks like a movie directed by a fashion designer.
Everything, from the leading man’s blizzard-white shirts to the bleary bedroom eyes of the supporting actress, seems perfected, as though attendants bearing brushes and safety pins had just stepped out of the shot. It looks like the sort of movie the former creative director of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent would make.
Yet whether we credit Ford, or his actors (Colin Firth and Julianne Moore in the aforementioned roles) or his source material - Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel of the same title, often considered an important milestone in gay fiction - the truth is there is more than a superficial elegance to A Single Man. It is a movie of uncommon depth of feeling, an understated, even chilly, monument to lost love.
It follows the novel in that it shows us a single day in the life of George Falconer (Firth), an English (in nationality and expertise)professor at a Los Angeles college in October 1962. The film begins with an image of a naked George sinking in what may be the ocean (or a vast pool of amniotic fluid), then quickly segues to a whited-out landscape across which the impeccably dressed George trudges toward a carefully arranged tableau - an automobile accident in which another impeccably dressed man and his fox terrier have been tossed from the car and lie beautifully dead, haloed by blood, in the snow.
George bends down to kiss the man and wakes with a start in his bed. We soon discover that the dead man in the dream is George’s recently deceased partner, Jim (Matthew Goode), who appears intermittently in flashback.
George is bereft, the single man of the title. And we’re about to follow him through a particularly freighted single day of his life - from his empty morning, and his desultory classes, to his encounters with a coy student (Nicholas Hoult, the kid from About a Boy all grown up), a gentle hustler (Jon Kortajarena) and his best friend, the boozy, rudderless Charley(Moore), a fellow expatriate Brit who harbors a tragic crush on him.
Ford’s direction is nothing if not ambitious, sometimes cheekily so, as he stages George’s flirtation with the hustler in front of a gigantic billboard advertising Hitchcock’s Psycho, but this sometimes distracting audacity is counterbalanced by tremendously subtle performances by Firth as a man who already considers himself dead and by Moore as an exotic, birdlike woman unsuited to the emotional weather of Southern California.
Isherwood’s story holds up, too, despite the probably necessary melodramatic tinkering performed by Ford and screenwriter David Scearce. A Single Man is an inexplicit novel - it probably needed a little juicing up for cinematic purposes.
While it would be easy to make fun of Ford’s more obvious and outre conceits, the truth is the film works. While his influences are obvious - Pedro Almodovar, Wong Kar-wai and (maybe more advocationally than stylistically) Julian Schnabel - Ford has managed to craft a moving and beautiful movie while doing no disservice to its undernoticed source material. Not at all bad for a first try.
MovieStyle, Pages 33 on 02/05/2010