A Single Man’: Art with a capital A

After watching two pretty good, if sloppy, football games, I spent Sunday evening in a movie theater. That, to me, is a perfect day.

The movie we saw, “A Single Man,” was directed by the fashion designer Tom Ford . And it shows it. Based on the 1964 Christopher Isherwood novel, “A Single Man” is an artsy effort set in 1962 Los Angeles. Colin Firth plays a college English professor who, still grieving the death of his lover (Matthew Goode) eight months before, has decided to end his suffering.

So he goes through his day, leaving his perfect glass-heavy house in Topanga Canyon, going to teach Aldous Huxley to dull students, getting approached by no less that two model-pretty young men, purchasing bullets for his pistol, preparing his suicide scene, having dinner with his oldest friend (Julianne Moore), having a drink with one of the pretty men and ending up back home, perhaps changing his mind. Though it may not matter as fate has a way of doing what it wants.

Firth is good, as is the singularly unsexy Moore (perfectly cast), and Goode has but a cameo. The pretty boys were cast no doubt for their looks because they can’t act a lick and one, at least, has all the callow qualities of a yet-to-be-paper-trained puppy.

So Ford fills the many empty moments with slo-mo shots, closeups of eyes and mouths and other random body parts, Lynchian portraits of straight suburban life and many flashbacks of the professor’s life with his now-dead lover.

It’s all played out like a fever dream. And that has some charm. For a moment or two.

Below : The trailer for “A Single Man.”