A DANDY IN ASPIC : Tom Ford’s ‘A Single Man’ [5/10]

Dry hair is, as we know, strictly for squids. Thomas Carlyle Ford – globally renowned fashion-designer-turned-film-maker – knows it, and now surely Colin Firth, the star of his feature-film debut A Single Man, knows it too. Because it can’t be a coincidence that Firth’s two finest hours – his Mr Darcy emerging from the Lyme Park lake in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice back in 1995, and now this belated career relaunch – both involve the actor getting his unruly locks sopping wet. In A Single Man, this is the result of a post-midnight skinnydipping session involving Firth’s character George – a gay, British-born professor of English at a California college in the early sixties – and his student Kenny (Nicholas Hoult.) Elsewhere, Firth’s locks are – in keeping with contemporary trends around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis – kept in neat order by what looks like a quite generous application of what’s known these days as “product.”
   Such attention to grooming detail is par for the course with regard to Ford, who’s surely the most immaculately turned-out director in the English-speaking world (over the Channel, La France‘s Serge Bozon would give him a run for his money.) And under his care it’s startling to see Firth shake off well over a decade of bumbling, tousle-haired diffidence and emerge, in his fiftieth year, as a leading-man of Clooney-esque suavity, charisma and elan. Firth’s before-our-very-eyes transition from taken-for-granted second-banana into Oscar-nominated national treasure is the most noteworthy aspect of A Single Man, a somewhat garbled adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s well-regarded 1962 novel.
   It’s set over the course of one particularly traumatic day, when George realises that he doesn’t want to go on living, that the pain of bereaved solitude is too much to bear – several months beforehand, his partner of 16 years, Jim (Matthew Goode), was killed in a car-crash. As he prepares to commit suicide, he puts his financial affairs in order, teaches his classes, enjoys a boozy dinner with his neighbour, best pal, and sometime lover Charley (Julianne Moore), all the while flashing back to happier days with Jim. But as the moment of action approaches, George’s nerve wavers – and fate throws not one but two potential new lovers into his path.
   What results is a kind of queasily morbid suspense, as we wonder whether or not George will actually go through with his calmly-planned course of action, whether or not he’ll find enough in the world to keep him going. There are moments of comic relief as he fumbles around inside a sleeping-bag – the latter deployed, presumably, to avoid messing up his immaculate bedroom – but the overall mood is downbeat, grief-saturated, sorrowful in its evocation of a sensitive individual’s nostalgia for previous happiness. Firth movingly conveys George’s combination of brittle exterior – the “mask” which society, even one as relatively “permissive” as Los Angeles in the early sixties, compels him to wear – and damaged, raw interior.
   It’s very much Firth’s show – Moore is fun in her brief appearances, but can’t quite get her mouth around Charley’s posh-English accent (Robert Downey Jr had similar problems as Sherlock Holmes); Goode and Hoult provide passable Yank inflections, though the latter must also contend with an unfortunate mohair sweater (his supposed allure is also somewhat diluted by the fact that his beach-boy tan looks sprayed on); the terrific Lee Pace, who has the 1960s Mad Men look down pat, is wasted in what’s little more than a cameo as one of George’s colleagues.
   The film is presented subjectively, as if seen through the prism of George’s sensory reactions – to the extent that, when he’s stimulated or engaged, the colour level rises. This takes some getting used to – at first, we wonder if something has gone wrong with the print, or if the characters are experiencing some kind of hot flush. It’s part of Ford’s stylistic box of tricks – just as George as seldom off screen for long, likewise barely a minute is allowed to pass without Ford reminding us of his presence, through some gimmicky directorial intervention (slow motion, saturated contrasts, extreme close-up, etc).
   In the world of fashion Ford is noted for his “classical” minimalism – but here he’s as fussy and flashy as a Westwood or a McQueen, as when he stages a key scene in front of a vast, anachronistically experimental mural supposedly advertising Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. To use the vernacular of the trade, Ford is all over the picture like a cheap suit – so that what should be a penetrating and resonant character-study becomes instead a disappointingly hollow if luxuriously appointed exercise in ostentation. A case of “Never mind the width, feel the quality,” perhaps.

Neil Young
21st April, 2010

A SINGLE MAN : [5/10]
USA (/UK) 2010 : Tom FORD : 101m (BBFC) : {14/28}
seen 18th April 2010 at Customs House, South Shields (£4.50)