Director: Tom Ford
Writers: Tom Ford, Christopher Isherwood, David Scearce
Starring: Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode
MPAA Rating: R
Running time: 101 min.

(4.5/5)

I have a soft spot for stories about outsiders, characters on the fringe of society, closeted or withdrawn. The mad ones as Kerouac called them. The stories have been told many times, and not always to great effect, yet occasionally a film comes along that goes further and finds a way to tell the story anew. Tom Ford’s A Single Man is just such a film. In style or tone, it bears shades of In the Mood for Love or Far From Heaven, but on the whole, from the reverse fade to black to the last fade to white, nothing was predictable and cinema for a couple of hours felt fresh again. Leave it to a first time director to open the possibilities of what can be done with the medium before the rigor mortis of familiarity had a chance to lay siege on him.

At the center of A Single Man is George Falconer (Colin Firth), an English professor recently widowed by the premature death of his longtime partner (Matthew Goode), who finds himself looking for a way out of the virile world of veneers and empty sentiments left in his absence. Obstacles abound in Ford’s depiction of Los Angeles in the sixties, a personal hell by way of Life Magazine through which the neurosis of Falconer is felt; as he says early on in the film, “A world without sentiment is not a world I wish to live in”. There is little solace to be had in the closeted single life he endures, socializing with his long-divorced dilettante friend, Charley (Julianne Moore), each reminding the other of what they sorely lack. Wounded, Falconer resigns himself to self-pity and the fleeting memories of bliss he once knew, aware that eventually he will have to take some kind of action. An Aldous Huxley maxim is used to underscore his existential dilemma: “experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him”.

The film itself is in no rush to get anywhere as it wafts about like cigarette smoke to hypnotic effect. The prolonged dialogue scenes and navel-gazing fascination with all things vintage may to some indicate a lack of discipline, or indulgent flaw owing to the director’s inexperience. And they would be missing the point entirely. Any story worth telling on the fleeting nature of happiness must stray off course and allow for a canvas big enough to make the revelations when they come feel like diamonds in the rough. It is a matter of proportion, and within the symmetry and perceived perfection of Ford’s nostalgia-tinged universe, Falconer struggles alone with his agitations, smothered by the world’s weight.

No mere pageantry of all things sixties and gay, the film is more existential than homosexual. Falconer’s sexual orientation is neither the driving force nor incidental, but played with a sensitivity rarely seen, it is his agony as a human being that garners the real drama. Colin Firth does an exceptional job internalizing the suffering of Falconer while trying to hold it together on the outside, and even behaves differently in the company of different characters, something that is often lost in lesser performances. Firth is supported, however, by an incredible script, original score, cinematography and direction that make it almost impossible for him not to succeed. Together they create a fever dream of hope and loneliness in a place of pure cinema, that says more about what it is to be alive than most films coming out of Hollywood today.