A Single Man
Village Theatre manager Sarah Kay chose A Single Man as the film to attract Village Theatre Society members to last Monday’s AGM. You can see why, too. It’s a film-lover’s kind of film, a conscious piece of visual and aural art and an experience definitely designed for the big screen.
In this adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s 1962 novel of the same name, Colin Firth (the star of any worthy film requiring an Englishman, it seems) plays George, a buttoned-down English professor at a minor college in Los Angeles. It is 1962 and the Cuban missile crisis is in full swing. The threat of invasion and/or immolation provides a palpable tension but George is too immersed in his own grief to notice. His partner of 16 years, Jim (Matthew Goode), has been dead for eight months and George is hollowed out. Waking each morning is a painful experience and each day he must consciously create a persona that can go out into the world and meet the expectations of the other people in his life. Because George is a gay man in the 1960s, he has had to become adept at role-playing, but this latest role is destroying him. With the aid of voice-overs, flashbacks and dreamlike flash-forwards, we accompany George through the day on which he has apparently chosen to die.
Despite his inner desolation, George is not utterly alone. Living nearby is Charley – played with great skill by Julianne Moore (The Shipping News, I’m Not There, The Big Lebowski). Charley is English, like George. They were lovers once long ago and she claims they could make a go of things again. This seems to be simply a gin-induced fantasy – George is certainly not for her.
The Strunks, the conventional nuclear family living next-door to George, are a real piece of work. Resembling an extended television commercial, they serve to remind George how marginalised he is in his real life.
At his college, George delivers a half-hearted lecture, ostensibly about Aldous Huxley’s After Many A Summer Dies The Swan, but he leads the discussion around to minorities and the fear they engender in the mainstream. He must not mention the particular minority of which he is a member, of course. This sparks the interest of one student Kenny (Nicholas Hoult from About A Boy), though this interest may have been aroused more by the lecturer than by the lecture.
Despite Kenny’s attempted interventions, George moves methodically through the day and towards his planned death. Along the way we learn about expectation, disappointment, true connection, clarity and cynicism. People who have seen the film already have some misgivings about the way the story ends. Funnily enough, the ending didn’t seem to be all that important – I was so engaged with the character of George and immersed in the experience of the film, that the ending didn’t bother me too much.
The film is a visual and aural treat. First-time director Tom Ford (he also co-wrote the screenplay) is a fashion designer in his day job. It shows – almost wherever you choose to look. Charley’s costume hair and make-up seem particularly perfect. I liked the recurring eye motif. A Single Man is beautifully shot and sensitively lit. Production design was by the team who brought us the television series Mad Men.
Colin Firth deserved the Oscar nomination he won for his portrayal of George. He won other awards elsewhere in the film world for this role. It’s not hard to see why. George dominates the script and the screen and Firth renders him perfectly. This is a seriously good performance. A Single Man is highly recommended.
Neil Wilson
