Some, critics and audience members, inevitably will do so. And it’s easy to see why, on one hand. Based on the Christopher Isherwood novel of the same name, A Single Man is an incredible visual experience, rich in color palette – at times, starkly de-saturated, and others, beautifully lush – contemplative, with its deconstruction of time elapsed.
The naysayers might have a point, too, if it weren’t for Ford’s chief asset, his ever-prolific lead man, Colin Firth. As George, A Single Man’s suffering protagonist, Ford singlehandedly grounds the film around him. A closeted gay professor in the early 1960s, George is the absolute outcast, the entity around which the world orbits in A Single Man.
“Only The Lonely” – Colin Firth is the Vision of Sadness in A Single Man
“Only the lonely know why I cry,” Roy Orbison once sang, and as in that song, the film conveys the sense that no matter how much misery may love company, the truth is, in life, we’re eventually all alone. Not exactly the cheeriest of sentiments, but in examining a day in the life of George, an English professor grieving the death of his lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), Ford revels in the simple, small beauties, even in the face of lingering devastation.
This mounting dread – built up in Shigeru Umebayashi’s Bernard Herrmann-referencing score – is something Ford and Firth completely inhabit from the opening frame, the awful thought of getting through one more day. Though Ford’s style is, at first, self-consciously arty, all the jump-cuts, fade-in and –out of deeper colors and slow, ponderous pans serve to create the broke down time-slip George has lived in since Jim’s death.
Small Wonders of Great Beauty in a Collapsing World
Avoiding many of the visual clichés of 1960s period pieces, Ford both rejects and embraces the Technicolor vision of perfection that has replaced some of the harder realities of the time. The smiling symbol of faux domestic bliss next door (Ginnifer Goodwin, Ryan Simpkins) is drained of emotion and sound, whereas a small conversation with a Spanish (Jon Kortajarena) gigolo gets cast in a beautiful, golden hour light of rosy pinks and soft blues.
It is a cinematic depiction of Los Angeles quite unlike any other that comes to mind. There is, as the Spanish character notes, something beautiful in the world’s destructive nature, and this doomed beauty pervades the entire production, present in radio and TV reports building up to the Cuban Missile crisis and outside George’s literal glass house.
So it goes with George’s closest friend, Charlie (Julianne Moore, in a brief but excellent performance) a holdout from his earlier London days. And Kenny, (Nicholas Hoult) one of George’s young, admiring students.
These people are all stuck in what is beginning to look like a series of cyclical downfalls – the death of the American dream, of idealism and so many other things. At one point in the film, George stands in front of a giant billboard for Psycho, but if A Single Man and Firth’s performance recalls any one Hitchcock film, it’s Vertigo.
Both tales of crippling love, the films encapsulate the impossibility of a life born out of compromises. And like Jimmy Stewart, Firth is the emotional realism linking us to a strange and spellbinding world turned upside down, haunted by a ghost between the frames.
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