‘Single Man’s’ tale of grief undercut by plot addition
“A Single Man” easily could have been one of those style-over-substance visual dazzlers, coming as it does from Tom Ford, the fashion designer who revived the house of Gucci.
Yet with Colin Firth delivering a career performance that’s pure elegance and heartache and Julianne Moore providing graceful support, it works as engaging drama as well as the sumptuous collection of images you’d expect from first-time director Ford.
Adapted from a Christopher Isherwood novel, “A Single Man” gorgeously re-creates 1960s design and decor, the production values so showy they could have overwhelmed this quiet story of a gay academic lamenting the death of his longtime lover.
Onscreen virtually the entire film, often alone with only the bottomless grief on his face driving the scene, Firth is riveting, the vibrant charm of his work in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and other frothy romances easily co-existing with his character’s melancholy.
It’s a tragic but simple story: Firth’s George Falconer, a British professor of English at a Los Angeles campus, going about what he intends to be the last day of his life.
Through flashbacks, we relive tender moments of his home life with Jim (Matthew Goode) and the awful day when George got word that his companion had died in a car wreck.
As George passionately lectures students, has a close encounter of potential romance with a stranger and shares witty phone chatter over preparations for an evening with dear friend Charley (Moore), it becomes clear that he plans to kill himself at day’s end.
George’s meticulous arrangements for his suicide and its aftermath – ranging right down to laying out his burial suit – were not part of Isherwood’s novel. Ford added the suicide element, which strengthens the cinematic tension and even adds a dash of macabre humor as George experiments with the best angles at which to hold the gun that will blow his head off.
But it winds up undermining the film’s finale, bringing rather coarse, even bludgeoning, irony to the man’s fate.