A Single Man (2009)

Seventeen days ago, the New York Senate struck down the state’s gay marriage bill.  Over the last few years, legislating bodies all over the country have been deciding whose love counts.  In A Single Man, the answer is everyone’s.

Based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel of the same name, A Single Man tells the story of one day in the life of a middle-aged gay man.  On this particular day, George Falconer (Colin Firth), a British professor of English at a small California college, goes about the normal business of his life.  He reads on the toilet, while watching the vanilla nuclear family next door with their holy-terror kids through his window.  He chides his housekeeper for leaving the bread in the freezer.  And he agrees to pick up Tanqueray for dinner with his lush of a best friend, Charley (Julianne Moore).

This day is unique in just one regard: it is the day that George has decided to end his life.  He has recently gotten the news that Jim (Matthew Goode), his partner of the last 16 years, has died in a car crash while visiting family.  Because the year is 1962 (the Stonewall riots are another seven years in the making), their love is “invisible” and George is not even allowed to attend the funeral.

Through flashbacks of their long years together, the film tacitly implies that life for George began on the day he met Jim and he can’t see much point in continuing it without him.  He’s already detached from the everyday things, as effectively suggested by the flat grayish cast on almost everything he sees.  He hears his colleague trying to engage him in a heated discussion of the Cuban Missile Crisis as they pass a tennis court, but he can see only his beloved Jim in the faces and bodies of the men playing.

In fact, all of the beautiful things in the world serve only to remind George of his lover.  Among the handful of those things is George’s student, Kenny (Nicolas Hoult, the kid from About a Boy, grown up quite nicely), who sees in George a kindred “invisible” spirit and has taken an interest in discussing literature and life with him.

Newbie director Tom Ford distinguishes these things of beauty – the perfect mouth of George’s pretty blonde teaching assistant and the night-blooming roses outside Charley’s house, for example – from the quotidian drabness by having his camera capture their color and brilliance in slow motion, while the orchestral score crescendos. It would be overwrought if this weren’t precisely how the world feels to someone in love, particularly someone who is suddenly and unfairly bereft of that love.  It’s like American Beauty without the statutory rape component.

Fashion plates and filmmaking have always made strange – and not always comfortable – bedfellows. (Remember Cindy Crawford in Fair Game?).  Here, the man formerly behind Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent proves that his impeccable taste translates to more than just well-designed suits (worn by Firth, Goode, and Hoult throughout the film) and perfectly period interior decorating.  Also sharing co-writing credits with David Scearce, Ford allows himself to get caught up in the nostalgic romanticism of the period just long enough to flesh out George’s real story.

It is a story told largely thanks to Firth’s immense talents as an actor.  Much of his career on American shores has been spent in romantic comedies in which the pudgy leading lady gets the bulk of attention, so it’s easy to forget his remarkable skill.  His iron British restraint, punctuated by the briefest moments of armor-dropping emotionality, serve to tell the story of a man whose life and love are trapped and made invisible.

It seems that even Charley can’t really see how much Jim meant to George.  She knows they were lovers but wonders why George doesn’t get into a “real relationship” with her.  Moore captures the spirit of a woman doting on a man who can’t possibly fall in love with her (although she’s really clueless why), without playing dim-witted or mean-spirited.

Despite the fortuitous timing, A Single Man is a movie without an obvious political agenda.  As with Isherwood’s original work, it is singularly superb.

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