As immaculate as a perfume advert
Tom Ford's first film offers style but very little substance, says Andrew M Brown

12 February 2010

A Single Man
12a cert, 101 mins

Is Tom Ford's debut film A Single Man really "a thing of heart-stopping beauty", as one critic has said? To be sure, it is immaculately stylised. But it's done in a self-adoring way: there is very little of substance to draw the viewer in. Films must reach the emotions as well as satisfy the aesthetic sense, and, on this evidence, Ford lacks this film-making instinct. We can watch and admire but we're not concerned about the characters.

The film is based on Christopher Isherwood's novel and set in 1962, just after the start of the Cuban missile crisis. Ford also wrote the screenplay. It depicts a single day in the life of George Falconer (Colin Firth), an English academic teaching at a campus in California, after he's told in a phone call that Jim (Matthew Goode), his lover of 16 years, has died in a car accident.

To add to the misery, the second thing the caller tells George is that, no, he won't be required at the funeral - it's for family only. At that moment we understand that George will be grieving in private just as, presumably, his relationship with Jim was kept discreet too. Not that we ever see George encountering overt prejudice on account of his homosexuality. The nearest thing is a remark made innocently by the daughter of a neighbour that implies hostility on the part of her father. Her daddy, she says, "says you're light in your loafers"; it only causes George to grimace slightly. On the whole, though, Ford presents the California setting as relatively relaxed and accepting - more relaxed than you imagine Britain to have been. We see the somewhat idealised moment, for instance, when George first meets Jim. It's at an easy-going beachside bar that's frequented by sailors - Jim himself is smartly turned out in an all-white naval uniform.

The makers pay loving attention to the design details of the period - everything from the automobiles and the houses to the suits, the narrow ties, fountain pens, safety razors and those oversized Alfie spectacles that Colin Firth wears. The cinematography by Eduard Grau also gives the picture a retro look. Grau experiments with colour and moves from brown, nearly monochrome shading, reflective of the hero's grief, to bright candy colours when the hero's mood perks up. For brief periods it has the grainy and jerky appearance of an eight-millimetre home movie. As you'd expect - since the director is the superstar fashion designer who turned Gucci's fortunes around - the film is as painstakingly designed as a fashion spread in a magazine or a prolonged perfume commercial.

So, George spends his day in winding up his affairs and saying goodbyes to the world. He teaches a final class on Aldous Huxley to students who are already set on their corporate careers. "I find them staring at me in a kind of bovine stupor," he says of them. He buys a revolver preparatory to shooting himself, which is his secret plan. On his bed he carefully lays out the clothes he will wear at his own funeral. It's the same outfit that he's wearing now - dark suit with narrow lapels, narrow tie and white button-down shirt. On the tie he leaves a note that says: "This is a Windsor knot."

The film touches on the paranoia that grips everybody in this sun-kissed paradise in the early 1960s - that one day the atom bomb will destroy them all, at least those who haven't had the foresight to have prepared a nuclear bunker. And, in any case, George has experienced a different kind of fear, the fear that comes from belonging to a feared or despised minority.

His remaining friend is Julianne Moore's Charley, a slurring, self-pitying divorcee - immaculately turned-out - and they spend a drunken early evening together reflecting on loneliness and lost love. They are desperate to have fun and a giggle but it's terribly strained. Charley, who holds a candle for George, says something that crushingly dismisses his 16 years with Jim as not "a real relationship with kids". And there is Nicholas Hoult as an intense student of George's named Kenny Porter. Hoult, the young lad in About a Boy, is now floppy-haired and epicene. You half expect him to ensnare George in some dangerous entanglement.

Firth's performance - nominated for an Oscar - is powerful. Firth conveys George's sadness, ironic detachment and English superciliousness and you also get the feeling that a torrent of distress, and no doubt rage, is whirling beneath the placid surface. Moore is also exactly right.

Still, something is missing from the narrative that leaves the movie cold and uninvolving. Perhaps the film-maker's obsession with beautiful things has got in the way of the human part of the story. Normally I am delighted to cry in cinemas. But here - even bludgeoned by Abel Korseniowski's lush, lachrymose music - I wasn't moved.