A Single Man
Tom Ford (2009)
Tom Ford is a famous fashion designer (whom I’d never heard of). It seems too obvious to say that his debut as a movie director is much more confident as a piece of design than as a piece of drama but it’s true. As the eponymous, homosexual George Falconer, an English professor (of English) at a Los Angeles university, Colin Firth must be one of the most sharply-dressed academics in history, real or cinematic. When Eduard Grau’s camera pans across the students in a lecture hall or walking or sitting around on campus they too look improbably well groomed, even for the early 1960s. Kenny Potter, the student whose relationship with George is one of the main strands of the story of A Single Man, is dressed all in white and his blue eyes stare into George’s soul: Ford might as well have gone the whole hog and given Kenny an accessory label on his forehead reading ‘Not as innocent as he looks’. George’s meticulous preparations for his impending death include laying out the suit, shirt and tie he means to wear in his coffin. He is in no sense the (self-described) ‘dirty old man’ of the Christopher Isherwood 1964 novel(la) on which the film is based and the last lines of which, in their description of George’s end, are:
‘And if some part of the non-entity we called George has indeed been absent at this moment of terminal shock, away out there on the deep waters, then it will return to find itself homeless. For it can associate no longer with what lies here, unsnoring, on the bed. This is now cousin to the garbage in the container on the back porch. Both will have to be carted away and disposed of, before too long.’
A Single Man takes us through George Falconer’s final hours. Ford’s screenplay, which he wrote with David Scearce, introduces a fundamental change from Isherwood’s book: in the film George gets up knowing that this will be the last day of his life because he intends to commit suicide before it’s over. According to an interview with him quoted in Peter Parker’s TLS review of the picture, Ford doubted whether the Isherwood material had the dramatic legs to survive on screen without this kind of spine to the story. His doubts may well have been well-founded but the new element is deeply unsatisfactory. Ford and Scearce haven’t thought through the implications of George’s planned suicide and its effects on other things that happen in the course of the day – 30 November 1962. It’s received wisdom that prospective suicides, having planned what they’re going to do, are more likely to be calm and ordered than they are to be frantically out of control in their last days: not only does George buy bullets for his gun, write farewell letters, and put his financial affairs in order; he also takes the opportunity to appreciate his last encounters with those he sees routinely – his housekeeper, one of the secretaries in the university department where he works – and to tell the people concerned how he values them. This idealised notion of the lead-up to killing yourself isn’t sustained, however: George isn’t calm and resigned when Ford sees a chance to liven things up by his protagonist’s getting angry or impassioned – during dinner with his old friend Charley, an expatriate lady lush, or when he start ranting to his college class about the plight of minorities. And neither these outbursts nor, until late in the day, his (non-physical) encounters with young men to whom he’s attracted appear to cause him to think twice about self-extinction – to consider that he has unfinished business with life, or the potential to find further joy or pleasure in it. It’s only after his climactic meeting with Kenny – they go skinny-dipping then get drunk at George’s house – that he decides against suicide. Kenny doesn’t seem to offer George the prospect of a new relationship as fulfilling as the one he enjoyed with his long-time partner Jim, killed in a car crash eight months earlier, so why does it bring about this change of mind? The prospect of suicide is used by Tom Ford purely to sharpen the narrative line of A Single Man – once it’s served this purpose, it’s eventually dropped and George, as in the novel, dies of natural causes.
Shortly before he pegs out, George’s voiceover tells us that:
‘A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think … And things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present and I realise that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.’
It’s hard to square this experience of life with George’s loss of Jim, with whom, we’re elsewhere led to believe, he enjoyed many years of sustained connection and happiness. The ‘everything is exactly the way it was meant to be’ may be a nod to Isherwood’s abiding interest in Hinduism (Don Bachardy is credited as a ‘creative consultant’), an interest which informs at least the conclusion of the novel but which makes no sense here. It’s a deathbed conversion, to put it mildly: there’s not a hint of George having this kind of religious sensibility elsewhere in the film. A Single Man really is all over the place. There’s more than one exchange about living in the past – is that the explanation for George‘s tuning in to radio and television broadcasts about the Cuban missile crisis a month after the crisis had passed, including Kennedy’s famous address to the nation of 22 October 1962[1] (or is the crisis just useful to jack up the apocalyptic angst that Ford seems to be after?)? What’s the point of the apparent confusions in the relative ages of George and Jim? As they sit reading together at home, not long before his death, Matthew Goode’s Jim is not much older than in the flashback to their first meeting – although their partnership has lasted sixteen years. But Colin Firth has been made up to look (albeit unconvincingly) much younger in the earlier flashback. The age difference there appears to be about ten years; it seems more like twenty-five in the chronologically later sequence.
I read the Isherwood book in a single day, on the Eurostar back from our holiday in Avignon in 2005 (an indication of what a short novel it is). I don’t recall it in detail but I do remember it as often amusing, sad but not miserable. There a few good lines in this adaptation but painfully few laughs – the tortured tone is very different from that of the original. (Oddly enough, although the suicide element of the narrative seems to run counter to Isherwood’s intentions, the sequence in which George makes comically unsuccessful attempts to finish himself off in a motel room, especially a routine with a sleeping bag, feel truer to the mood of the novel.) The film moves with lugubrious slowness. Every shot is carefully composed and stays on the screen long enough for us to read its meaning (and then some): we see George handling his gun then the annoying little boy next door playing with his gun and George pretending to shoot back, that kind of thing. The faux-classical score by Abdel Korzeniowski unnecessarily underlines the gloom – and the monotony of the proceedings. George has a recurring dream of feeling he’s drowning. The nude bathing with Kenny, as I remember it from the book, is shocking and disorienting but also, from George’s point of view, life-enhancing. Ford gives it the same claustrophobic quality as the other underwater sequences.
It’s not surprising that Colin Firth’s performance as George has been overpraised – this is the best I’ve seen from him but to say that this actor gives the performance of his life doesn’t mean that much. Firth is intermittently impressive – in his reactions to odd lines or looks from Kenny and Jim and, especially, a Spanish prostitute called Carlos; and to the news of Jim’s death, which he receives in a telephone call. (The voice of Jim’s cousin is supplied by an uncredited Jon Hamm, who reads very well and compellingly.) When George gets out of bed at the start of the film and looks in his shaving mirror he sees not ‘the face of a human being but the expression of a predicament’. That’s the problem with Colin Firth’s portrait. The actor playing George needs to let the audience in on what’s going inside the character’s head but it’s surely essential that his private anguish and suicidal intentions aren’t obvious to all those he meets in the course of the day. Firth presents an ashen, tormented face to the world at large. He’s also evidently in better physical shape than George is meant to be. When he and Kenny run from a bar to have their dip in the sea and they clamber down the beach shelf, the younger man offers his hand and says ‘I’ll help you down, sir’: Firth, who’s hardly been outrun by Nicholas Hoult, doesn’t look as if he needs it. And his appearance neutralises the character: in his sober suit and white shirt and his heavy horn-rimmed spectacles, Firth looks more a businessman than an academic.
It says a lot about A Single Man that, after half an hour, I was looking forward to Julianne Moore’s next appearance. As Charley, she shows much more theatrical flair than usual – and it’s a quality in desperately short supply in this picture. Moore occasionally overdoes Charley’s fusillades of gin-soaked laughter but she looks great – like an aging, permanently off-balance fashion model – and she has fun with the English accent, which she handles wittily. Her doing the twist to Booker T and the MGs’ ‘Green Onions’ – and getting Colin Firth into the spirit of the dance – is one of the movie’s few highlights. (I liked Julianne Moore more here than in anything I’ve seen her do since Boogie Nights.) Both the younger American men are played by British actors. Nicholas Hoult is too immediately insistent as Kenny; he needs to emerge more subtly, but inevitably, as the sexual focus of George’s attention. Matthew Goode has a relaxed, humorous quality as Jim, and his knowingness is easier to accept. The best of these objects of desire is Jon Kortajarena as Carlos; he acts naturally and expressively and you get a sense of what George is seeing in him – it’s a welcome change from what Hoult and, to a lesser extent, Goode explicitly project. (The casting of Kortajarena – according to Wikipedia, he’s best known as an A-list male model – is one instance where Tom Ford’s background pays dividends.) It’s a pity that the exchange between George and Carlos is so ostentatiously designed: the muted colours of what’s gone before are replaced by startling pink-orange evening sunlight and their conversation takes place against the background of a wall displaying a vast poster for Psycho.
It’s remarkable that certain actors beloved of middle England will draw an audience to the Richmond Filmhouse regardless of what they’re appearing in. The place was nearly full for the mid-Sunday afternoon showing of A Single Man but I’ve no idea what some people there got out of the film. When George and Jim look at one of their dogs, Jim says how nice it must be to have the dog’s life, and George agrees, with one of the better lines in the script, ‘Yes, being able to sniff whoever’s arse you like …’. There were little gasps of shock in the audience (‘Mr Darcy!’), the same as when Judi Dench said ‘Fuck’ (once) in Mrs Henderson Presents. The more surprising element in the audience was a youngish couple who were doing a kind of anti-Valentine’s Day cabaret. This lasted from when we were waiting in the foyer to go in until the person unlucky enough to be sitting next to the couple creditably asked them to stop arguing. (After telling her to mind her own business, they did.) At one point, the woman slapped the man. A few minutes later, he told her, ‘The problem with you is that you’re an alcoholic but you can’t hold your drink’. If that was right and considering the representation of women in the film, A Single Man may not have been the ideal choice for this pair to see together on the fourteenth of February.
14 February 2010
[1] ‘This Government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military build-up on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere. … ‘