THE ONES THAT NEARLY GOT AWAY #4: a review of "A Single Man" (2009)

“A SINGLE MAN” Co-Written and Directed by Tom Ford (2009)
*1/2 (one and a half stars)

I’m afraid that this one was just more than a little lost on me.

“A Single Man,” the Directorial debut of fashion designer Tom Ford was enormously celebrated by critics and Oscar nominated during its theatrical run this previous winter. Yet, for me, I felt the film kept me at arms length, at such a distance that I was unable to fully connect with the albeit compelling material in front of me. After a time, I was put off by a certain pretentiousness and by the maudlin and prefabricated melodrama of the conclusion, I had rejected it altogether.

Colin Firth stars as George Falconer, a British Professor of English at a Los Angeles university during the early 1960s. The path of the film charts the course of what he is planning to be the final day of his life, as he has been overwhelmingly crippled with grief after the sudden death of his longtime partner of 16 years (Matthew Goode).

In some respects, the film reminded me a bit of the Ian McEwan novel, Saturday, a meditative and intricately detailed travelogue of a day in the life of a middle aged man. Not much actually happens during “A Single Man.” He gives a lecture. He strikes up an insightful conversation with a potentially interested student (Nicholas Hoult). He spends a melancholic and alcoholic evening with his cherished London friend, Charley (Julianne Moore). And throughout it all, he reminisces and ruminates over the love of his life, his status as a closeted homosexual and sad existence and an irrational invisible threat to society’s majority while carrying a gun within the confines of his satchel, planning to end it all that evening.

Colin Firth does give a strong performance of a stricken and stiff man consumed with grief and a complete dispassionate involvement with life. I found the sequence when he first hears of his lover’s death via car crash to be the film’s strongest moment, played as it would possibly happen in real life. There is no music score or fancy cinematography emphasizing and exaggerating the mood and inherent emotions. Just silence and the camera, close on Firth’s disintegrating face. Much of the cinematography in the film is a drab grey color, visually depicting the George Fletcher’s ghostly state of being. Yet, here and there, either through a smile or scent or a warm gaze, the film slowly seeps in lush colors, showing the life and world Fletcher has long disengaged himself from and will soon leave behind.

Those traits were just fine. My problems stemmed from the fact that this movie was more than a bit of a slog for me. Its not a long movie, but I could feel every moment ticking by slowly and the effect was numbing. Julianne Moore’s performance was surprisingly a huge disappointment as I kept finding myself becoming distracted by the English accent she could never keep a stranglehold on. Mostly, it was the preponderance of faux meaningful gazes set to mournful classical music and sequence after sequence of George Fletcher drowning in a ocean of water that eventually began to irritate me. It felt like Ford was consciously trying to make an "art film" with a capital "A," instead of allowing the story and deep emotional content work for itself. I cannot blame him for trying, and believe me, I appreciate him doing so, but it just didn't work for me.

But, like a few other movies I have seen this year, it was the ending that put me off entirely as it felt to be a forced cheat of the worst kind. I would certainly not spoil it for you dear, readers, but let me try to explain it like this. Pretend you have a story about a woman deciding whether to have or not have an abortion. She wrestles with her decision making endlessly, encounters a variety of characters designed to sway her one was or another and then in the final crucial moment of her decision-making, she falls down the stairs and has a miscarriage.

The ending of “A Single Man” is soap opera story telling at its laziest and most clichéd. It completely robs the character of making a fatal decision for himself and thus made the experience of the film as a whole a meaningless one. At least, that is how it felt to me. It felt like a waste of time. It was disheartening enough to see this man go through such a wrenching existential crisis and for the life of me, I just wasn’t engaging with it but to end up feeling like the filmmakers let themselves off of the hook left me with a movie that was nothing more than a well-intentioned and well-filmed swindle.