A Single Man - Performance Over Style

A Single Man is one of those movies where the style almost gets in the way of the story. Marking the directorial debut of fashion designer Tom Ford, the film tells the story of George (played by Colin Firth), an English professor circa 1960's Los Angeles, whose longtime lover, Jim (played by Matthew Goode), has just been killed in a car accident. George, overcome with loneliness, has decided to kill himself, and the film charts his final day.

A lot of criticism has been aimed at Ford for his thick stylistic direction. The set designs seem straight out of a Mad Men ad, and the Madison Avenue advertisers are even mentioned early on in a wink to the audience. George's house (what would appraise, even in today's broken bubble market, for untold millions of dollars) is a virtual hit list of the best of Frank Lloyd Wright, and everyone on screen is dressed to the nines and as handsome as underwear models.

On first viewing, I was distracted by Ford's swaying camera and slick editing, and wanted something plain and simple. After all, it is a simple story he's telling; a homosexual man who has had to hide a side of himself from those around him in order not to be ostracized. A man who has lost the one and only human being he could completely be himself around, and who is left with no one he has a connection to, save for his alcoholic former lover, Charlie (played by Julianne Moore), who is on her own path of lonely decline. Instead of just telling George's story, Ford instead dissolves in and out of flashbacks, turns his camera upside down, and repeatedly cuts to symbolic shots of Firth struggling nude as he drowns in the ocean.

On second viewing, and after reading some insightful reviews of the film, I came at A Single Man from another angle, and understood what Ford was doing was showing us something of the mask George presented to others; slick, upscale, not a hair out of place, with a fine pressed suit, and a confident, intellectual, heterosexual exterior, in opposition to the inwardly confused and drowning homosexual George, suddenly cast adrift from Jim, his anchor.

However you approach it, the film belongs to Colin Firth, in a restrained performance that is limitless in what he does not say. There is a scene where he flirts awkwardly with one of the school's secretaries, and you know that he has done this dozens of times before - telling her she is pretty, that her hair is sexy - but this time, his performance falters, and we know and she knows there's nothing erotic behind it for him. In one of several powerful scenes between Firth and Moore, Moore pleads, in her alcoholic state, that they give it another shot as lovers, and perhaps move back to Paris, where she believes they were happy, and in Firth's muted response, we know that he never was happy, and was only giving their relationship a shot in an attempt to act "normal" (i.e. heterosexual), as he had always presented himself in public.

In the best scene in the film, Firth receives a phone call from one of his lover's family members informing him Jim has been killed, and when Firth is denied invitation to the funeral because of the nature of their relationship, and when Firth is informed that the parents did not even care to inform him of Jim's death, Firth, instead of getting angry, diverts the subject to whether their dogs were killed in the accident as well. It is a heartbreaking scene that Firth handles seated in a chair, with very little movement, maintaining, always, his well-educated, well-spoken voice and poise, as he has trained himself to do in all situations where he might otherwise reveal who he really is to the potentially hostile society around him.

Firth's performance, indeed, overcomes whatever flaws there may be in the heavy-handed direction that is, really, a stylistic mask not unlike the one George puts on every morning.