Based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man follows one day — it is not a spoiler to say: the last day — in the life of George Falconer, a professor of English at UCLA (I think) in 1962. George is originally English, is gay, and the film opens with the death of Jim, his lover of sixteen years. Eight months after Jim’s death, George remains distraught, though it is now something that he has buried from the view of outsiders.
I’m torn on this. I found it stylistically annoying: swelling music; changes in color and tint for no obvious reason; limbs moving in water, again for no obvious reason. Tom Ford overwhelmed the power of the story in his search for visual flair. There are also scenes or flashbacks that I still don’t understand. What is the relevance of the family across the street? I thought it was a flashback to George’s family until the little girl turned up in the bank.
That said, it is an immensely powerful film, built almost entirely upon a stunning performance by Colin Firth, as George. That performance saves the film from Ford’s best efforts to sabotage it. Firth portrays George’s grief not as repression — though his Englishness sometimes suggests that manners trump feelings — but as control, as the fear of people seeing what he is, both homosexual and grief-stricken. In the central speech of the film, George lectures to a bunch of nitwits about the power of fear as a motivator in bigotry and violence against minorities.
The middle of the film is wonderful. George goes to work, has a conversation with one of his students, has another with a young Spanish man, has dinner with Julianne Moore (in another perfectly calibrated performance) and prepares his own death, but none of it is maudlin. Firth has a wonderful smile and you fixate on his mouth and eyes when he in conversation.
I have my doubts about the end of the film, which we can talk about if anyone else watches this or cares enough to talk about it. I found the student who follows George to be intensely annoying, and not that bright, so it was not clear what the basis of attraction was. And the end was too pat, I think. Flawed, certainly, but still very much worth watching.
I share your ambivalence but was also moved by the film, mostly impressed with Tom Ford’s fashion-forward formalism, and angered by the ending. The changes in color and tint, as I understood it, was connected to the emotional interior of George’s character. Most of the day he lumbers about in monochromatic melancholia, but on occasion a memory, or a beautiful man or boy, or a momentary feeling of happiness floods the screen with technicolored abandon. And though cliche, I think the images of George sinking in water was meant to be a metaphor (and seems to be connected to his beach memories of his partner). The family across the street seemed to stand for a kind of oppressive heteronormativity – an openness which George will never be able to experience (and the fact that his lover is dead doesn’t help). There was also a couple of references to the fact that the little boy across the street was possibly gay or at least a little queer (though I can’t remember the specific details). And Ginnifer Goodwin played the mom and I would watch her read the phone book.
SPOILER. Have you read Isherwood’s novel? I was really curious if George died in the novel because, after digging around a bit, it seems that Ford made a lot of changes in his adaptation (many of which angered Isherwood purists). It made me so angry that George had a heart attack after determining suicide was not a viable option. Wouldn’t the film have been so much better (and a whole lot less masochistic) if George had simply gone to sleep after realizing there was still a little hope (most of which was bound up in the boy sleeping on his couch not so much as an object of sexual desire but as a glimpse of a possible future for gay men). The irony of his death seemed like a slap in the face given Firth’s wonderfully modulated performance.
dear chris,
giving away the end of a movie whose end is entirely unpredictable constitutes a major spoiler. i read the beginning of your post when i was halfway through the movie and it spoiled the movie for me. i suggest you are merciful to the other (two) readers of this blog and put a spoiler alert at the beginning of your review.
SPOILER!
dear chris and jeff,
i choose to believe that george does not die. i watched the scene several times and both simon and i agree it’s not clear. hence, he doesn’t die. he has a little heart attack which means whatever (reminder of mortality? a brief encounter with jim? aging? you pick).
i found the movie slow and i was a little annoyed at the pointed lack of sexual expressions (not even kissing, for godssakes). but it’s a worthy movie about the ridiculous, absurd, and heartbreaking loneliness of the surviving half of a same-sex couple, and for this alone i give it praise.
But doesn’t the heart attack connect with the images of the drowning man in George’s dreams? It seemed pretty cut and dry to me, but now I’m going to have to return to the film and watch the end again. I want to believe he lives . . . but that was not how I received those final scenes on first viewing the film.
Who is George going to kiss? He’s still in mourning. Sweet Nicolas Hoult wanted to kiss him, I think (hard to believe he was the sad youthful lead in About a Boy), but George was still embracing his self-imposed downward spiral.
there could have been lots of kissing and sexing in the flashbacks, no? there was only some lame kissing in the new house that george was too self-conscious to carry through. and some very cozy reading together. also, there were some obvious erotics going on with the dumb (hahahah, chris!) student, so some sexing could have happened there too.
there is no obvious dying, only cinematic conventions that tell us that if a dude has a heart attack at the end of a film and eventually lies still, it means he’s dead. but he moves a second before the camera pans out to show his still body on the bedroom floor, so i decide he’s living. that of course leaves the problem of why he should have had the heart attack at all — the narrative meaning of that — but i choose to ignore this problem.
I thought this movie was really quite good.
The saturation of color change was gimmicky, and maybe unnecessary, because Colin Firth is more than up to the challenge of expressing subtle changes in how his character feels throughout the day, but it didn’t really bother me, and it did look nice. And it’s not just “a beautiful man or boy” that brings him back to life: The secretary at his office and the bridget bardot-looking girl both bring color – a little too literally – back to his world temporarily. That is not to downplay George’s homosexuality, but to show that there are still things in his life besides poor substitutes for Jim which can bring him brief joy.
The movie looks beautiful: clothes, set and buildings, eyeglasses, cigarettes… I’d expect nothing less from Tom Ford on these points, and he delivers. But big credit to him for getting fine performances as well. Julianne Moore’s great, and the phone call with Jon Hamm in which he learns of Jim’s death was a perfect mix of outrage and sadness. (I can only assume Jon Hamm was wearing a beautiful Tom Ford suit on the other end of the phone.)
Another scene that struck me hard was George nearly losing his self-control when he sees a dog of the same breed as the ones he lost along with Jim. He gets too close for too long with the dog through the car window and the owner’s increasing uncomfortableness comes right through.
I can’t imagine there is any doubt about George’s death. To quote another Englishman, his metabolic processes are a matter of interest only to historians. It didn’t feel cheap or easy to me. The heart attack had been telegraphed from the very beginning of the movie and throughout and was expected.
Anyway, I’m late here by 13 months, but only saw it last night, and found it words-worthy.
I do totally agree with Gio that Chris’ first sentence indeed qualifies as a major spoiler.
Well then, sorry. It seemed so foreshadowed throughout the movie that I could not imagine any other ending. But I’ll be more careful. Note that I didn’t tell you if any of the Expendables failed to come home alive.
It was Earth all along.
She’s a guy.
They’re the ghosts.
He’s dead.
thread killer.