It’s true that Colin Firth does some of the finest acting of his career in A Single Man. Too bad that he does such fine acting in such an affected, meretricious, and finally silly film. The movie, adapted by director Tom Ford and David Searce from Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel, chronicles a day in the life of George, a British academic living in Los Angeles and trying to cope with the sudden death of his longtime partner, Jim. Isherwood, an exemplary British modernist, was working in the literary subgenre pioneered by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Ford, a renowned fashion designer, appears here as a not-what-you’d-necessarily-call-exemplary master of not-quite post-modern mélange, an artiste for whom every emotional state or temperature can only find its signifier via the Soho gallery, the fashion spread, the runway show, the $250,000 back page ad.
People who are familiar with my writings, and particularly with my often dyspeptic comments elsewhere, know that one thing that really gets up my nose is when a writer uses the word “arty” to mean something of particularly artistic (and potentially rather non-commercial) aspiration and/or achievement. Hence, when my old buddy Anne Thompson calls a Steven Soderbergh digital film “arty,” I object, because Soderbergh’s a real artist who’s got a very sure hand. Sometimes his efforts fail or fall short, but they’re not presumptuous or pretentious or strained, that is, “arty.” No, I think a word like “arty” needs to be reserved for something like this picture.
A picture in which not 40 seconds can go by without Ford parading out some ostentatious visual effect, be it a draining of the color pallette or the introduction of a coed who looks to have been bioengineered from the genes of Nico, Edie Sedgewick and Kate Moss—hanging out on a fall 1962 campus, yet! Look at the still at the top of this post, a recollected George and Jim idyll; kinda makes you miss Herb Ritts, doesn’t it. But check it out; when George goes to the liquor store (for gin, of course) and is cruised by a hispanic fellow with a James Dean-out-of-Johnny-Suede hairstyle, well, then the colors go all oversaturated, orange burning into pink and even beyond. Is it because the hombre, he is muy caliente, si? No, of course not, don’t be so crude. Then again, the effect is so ham-fisted that it does kind of play that way. Incidentally, that billboard behind the two of them is ostensibly for Hitchcock’s Psycho. Or maybe Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, I dunno. As for ostentatious audio effects, fear not; the hypertrophied-to-the-point-of-decadent “romantic” swells of Abel Korzeniowski’s score are pumped up to deafening volume whenever Ford has the itch; similarly, when George gets particularly fraught (on account of contemplating suicide), his alarm clock ticks even louder than usual.
Have I mentioned what a fabulous house George lives in by the way? All parallelograms of wood and glass on the outside, and recessed lighting and nooks on the inside. Not a typical expat academic’s abode at all (Pnin’s head might explode at the sight of it!), but hey, Jim was an architect, and isn’t that convenient. (I see that Ford also studied architecture, too.) I’m not against attractive settings in movies, mind you, but I just get a bit of a headache when the filmmakers concoct some sort of fetish object out of each and every attractive setting. And I’m certainly not against visual style in films; in fact I tend to be a bit of a sucker for it. But I’m also a bit old-fashioned in my belief that form and content ought to have something to do with each other, and that when you’re able to craft convincing moments of emotion and connection—and there are a few of them here, mostly between George and Matthew Goode’s Jim—underscoring those moments with completely non-sequiterish stylistic flourishes seems a little, well, perverse. Or worse yet, kind of dumb. There is something at the core of this movie that seems stubbornly lunkheaded, and it makes you suspicious. I would like to believe that Ford did not dress Nicholas Hoult in an angora sweater as some sort of homage to Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda…but honestly, I can’t quite be sure. Similarly, the film’s “twist” ending practically begs for a South Park character to walk in and exclaim “What incredible irony!” All of the actors, including Julianne Moore, in a characterization that compelled the ever-gallant David Poland to revive the ancient slur “fag hag,” achieve the dimensions they’re aiming for. Too bad their director is working in a different galaxy.
I agree with everything you say here. Yet, there’s a total, naïve earnestness to the film and it’s notions of romance, that I felt a bit charmed by it even though I didn’t enjoy it very much.
Man, that sweater was distracting…
I am shocked that a former fashion designer would make a film that is all style and no substance. Shocked, I say.
Thanks for this Glenn, felt the same way. It played like some weird Rebus puzzle: Isherwood + “Mrs. Dalloway” + Vogue – 1/2 Isherwood + 2 Mandate pinups.
You’re right, it’s a glorious portrait by Firth – but the frame is pure gilded nonsense.
It’s the ending that really rubs me the wrong way. It slathers irony onto Isherwood’s reverie about the potentiality, not necessarily the actuality, of death. And the addition of the planned-but-never-executed suicide is a hoary bit of melo that makes George’s homosexuality come off like Camille’s TB.
C’mon now, “Steven Soderbergh’s Schizopolis” is super pretentious.
Don’t get me wrong, I love that film, and I wouldn’t label it presumptuous or strained…but it is pretentious.
I saw the film at the Chicago Film Festival early in October so I hadn’t at all heard about the color timing ridiculousness yet. It seems like such an obvious problem with the movie, you’re surprised that no one Ford showed it to said “Gosh Tom, you know that’s horribly distracting and rather stupid, right?”
Half the time it seems like the actors are sitting there, waiting to speak so that the colors can slowly turn vibrant and bright or drain almost completely. And when Ford cuts between a glowing, bright, saturated young man and a sickly, desatured Firth? It makes you want to burn the lab down that did this for him.
I will say that the one thing that rings true in the movie, in any scene, is the leering, sexual desire that Firth (and his POV shots) show whenever Nicolas Hoult starts essentially throwing himself at his teacher (as in the last still). At the very least what you have there is a succesful succession of shots. Firth’s face turns from stone to a small smile, cut to Hoult with his lips open about an inch from the camera, cut to Firth’s small smile turning slightly disturbed at the smile, cut to Hoult returning the smile, cut to Firth with desire/longing/sadness, etc. I think the success of those are due to the actors, though I was nearly willing to go with the film after that scene.
The rest of it is so mannered though, and so often clearly shot around a lack of money. Odd for a picture so completely embedded in the lives of rich people. You think about a film with an even lower budget than this, The Squid and the Whale, a completely different film, but one that evokes a period much more than this because of how much better a filmmmaker Baumbach is, and how much of the neighborhood you see. We’re barely ever outside in A Single Man. We barely ever see the places in which these characters live. I have no idea what the front of Firth’s place looks like, or how a neighbor might be able to see him through the window, because I have no idea where these spatial pieces fit together.
I’m going to wheel out a phrase that supposedly came from William Burroughs when he called something “chic as Cecil Beaton’s ass.” I haven’t seen the Tom Ford movie, but it seems to apply. It doesn’t surprise me that Colin Firth and Matthew Goode generate some heat. I thought Matthew Goode did a fine job in The Lookout.
There’s nothing pretentious about this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoRWAJDEfj8
SCHIZOPOLIS is a goofy, hilarious film.
@maximilian
You mean the movie where they didn’t sell Rhode Island to the fucking Japanese?
I love “Schizopolis” for a lot of reasons, but the key one is, weirdly, Soderbergh doesn’t take it seriously. I almost feel like it’s hilarious because otherwise he’ll cry, and he just can’t handle that. I frankly feel a lot more connection and interest in it than anything he’s done in years (with all due courtesies to our host, of course).
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