Susan Granger’s review of “A Single Man” (Weinstein Company)
If anyone needed convincing, this bleak, depressing drama about grieving verifies once and for all that Colin Firth (best known as Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s “Pride and Prejudice”) is an actor of the very highest order, playing a discreetly gay man, struggling with loneliness after the accidental death of his partner of 16 years in a car crash.
Set in Los Angeles in 1962, in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis, the story unfolds during one fateful day in the orderly, ordinary life of 52 year-old George Falconer (Firth), a gentle, reserved British college professor who is contemplating suicide, as poignant, idyllic memories of his lost lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), dominate both his waking and sleeping hours. Methodically, George lays out his meticulously folded funeral clothes on his bed, empties his safe-deposit box and carefully arranges pertinent papers on his desk.
But first, he’s planning to have dinner with Charley (Julianne Moore), his closest confidante/old flame, a fellow Brit who’s now an alcoholic divorcee with her own isolation issues. As the hours pass, he encounters a Spanish hustler, Carlos (Jon Kortajarena), and surreptitiously banters with a persistently flirtatious student, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), who is determined to strike up more than just a friendship in the same beachside bar where George had met Jim.
Inspired by a 1964 stream-of-consciousness novella by Christopher Isherwood, Tom Ford financed, produced, directed and co-wrote the non-linear, vignette-studded screenplay with David Scaearce. Before this first foray into films, Ford built a formidable reputation in the fashion industry as the creative director of Gucci. As a result of this background, no doubt, several surreal, overtly sensual sequences of chiseled nude men floating under water are more distracting than a visual adjunct to the storyline.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “A Single Man” is a sleek, sensitive, soulful 7, saved from Ford’s overtly stylistic, sophisticated elegance by Firth’s sly, subtly engaging portrayal and the realization that the titular youngster in “About a Boy” has grown up and is now hunky Nicholas Hoult.
