Film review: A Single Man

Published on Sunday 7 February 2010 10:34

A SINGLE MAN (12A) *** Director: Tom Ford Running time: 99 minutes

LIKE Marmite, holidays in Stornoway, and your father-in-law's jokes, Colin Firth is an acquired taste. To some, he's a claustrophobic actor, who seems to specialise in emotionally constipated characters. For others, he makes diligent male decency somewhat sexy. And for me, he's one of the most frustrating pickers of unreliable vehicles today. If I was a car salesman, I'd be rubbing my hands at the sight of an approaching Firth, knowing that at last there's someone to take that shonky Toyota off my hands.

A Single Man has all the signs of being another wayward selection: an arthouse movie that marks the directorial debut of Tom Ford, whose previous work was designing suits and sunglasses for Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. Yet although Ford is steeped in style, it's Firth who gives this film deeper emotional colours.

George (Firth) is a middle-aged professor grieving for the love of his life, who died eight months earlier in a car accident. Because it is 1962, and his partner was a man, George's sorrow is a private one, barely acknowledged even by his close friend, Charley (Julianne Moore), a needy, ageing beauty who is equally lonely and even more desperate since she secretly hopes that George might go straight – and straight into her arms.

Not only is George not planning to go straight, he isn't even planning to go on. What we see in flashbacks is a comfortable relationship that gave George's life purpose — something his existence now lacks. Today will be his last, and he spends it trying to tie up his affairs: emptying a safe-deposit box at the bank, leaving notes for friends, buying bullets and fussing over which suit to wear in his coffin. But life keeps offering him hope – most enthusiastically in the form of some very pretty men, including a gorgeous hustler (Jon Kortajarena) and a fresh-faced and flirtatious student (Nicholas Hoult).

Most of A Single Man is shot in near-monochrome to underline George's grey perspective of his life but when something, or some boy, perks his interest the screen floods with vital full-screen Technicolor. This is, perhaps, a rather film student touch, and not even a consistent one; when George recalls a blissful day on the beach with his boyfriend, the whole thing is shot in black and white, as if Calvin Klein had a new beachwear range to push.

Ford doesn't know when to quit, and he hamstrings his own movie with art direction. He wants George – and us – to discover that life is beautiful, but overeggs it so that in George's life everything is impossibly beautiful. He drives a polished Mercedes, dresses impeccably if at inordinate length, and lives in a modernist home of steel and glass that makes you wonder what they were paying professors in 1962. And would anyone as private as George buy a home with a loo so easily viewed by the neighbours?

In the middle of this coffee-table story, however, there is Firth. Loss and mourning are hard emotions to make real on film but the landscape of Firth's face is eloquent. We see him receiving the news of his companion's death by telephone and Ford has the sense to keep the camera locked on the actor as he struggles to keep back his emotions. With a minimum of motion, Firth offers refreshing simplicity in the middle of Ford's gorgeous excessiveness.

General release from Friday

&#149 This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 07 February 2010