I feel about Colin Firth in A Single Man (2009) much as I did about George Clooney in Michael Clayton (2007): I would like to see him win Best Actor, because it is no simple trick to inhabit the day-to-day human dimensions of a character without setpieces, but for the same reason he probably won't. Unless their subjects are historical, I don't think the Academy appreciates character studies as much as it should. What I feel stupid about is not realizing until conversation afterward with Eric that A Single Man is also (because the personal is) a political film. A man is grieving for his lover of sixteen years, killed senselessly in a road accident eight months ago and since then every day has been harder and harder to get through: what could be more personal—or more universal—than that? Except that the date is November 30, 1962 and the lover's name was Jim; the airwaves are burning up with the Cuban missile crisis, not the Stonewall Inn. How do you grieve for someone whose existence you are not allowed to acknowledge outside of one friendship and your own crumpling heart? Officially, George Falconer is a single man. Meticulous, well-dressed, a model of slightly ironic English reserve in the college culture of southern California. A lifelong bachelor, his obituary might say. But he's a bereaved widower and it's tearing him apart.1
I have no idea how closely the film resembles its source novel by Christopher Isherwood, but considered simply as a movie, I think it's one of the best new things I've seen in theaters this year.2 The criticism that its style overrides its substance misses the point. The style is entirely in service of placing the viewer inside George's head, his autopilot dissociation from the present that sharpens momentarily into full color as a word, a look, a Krakatoa smog-haze of sunset catches his eye and pulls him briefly into the world, his mounting inability to keep his life with Jim—the sweet and the painful memories both—from bleeding up into the neatly compartmentalized minutiae of his daily routine, even as he prepares to render the whole question moot with an old service pistol and some newly purchased bullets.3 And it shouldn't be, but it's still rare to see a gay character's sexuality treated so matter-of-factly in a mainstream film; I don't have the technical vocabulary to articulate it properly, but the point I want to make is that while the default of the film's world is not gay, the film's default is. The camera is always someone's eye and here it's George's. And the director, Tom Ford, dedicated A Single Man to Richard Buckley, his partner of twenty-three years.
Incidentally, both posters I've seen for the movie are misleading. Julianne Moore's Charley is certainly an important presence in George's life and potentially last day, but the face haunting over his shoulder should have been Matthew Goode's. Jim was not a substitute for anything, do you understand? And there is no substitute for Jim. Anywhere.
1. It is a credit to the film and the actors that although Jim is never onscreen except in dreams and photographs and memory flashes, we understand exactly why George is falling apart without him.
2. I have to specify; I've seen a number of movies in theaters this past year, but most of them were things like Z (1969), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (1989), The Red Shoes (1948), and M. Hulot's Holiday (1953). All hail art houses.
3. There is a beautifully gallows-funny scene in which George, who desires his suicide to be as orderly, unfussy, and as little in need of clean-up as possible, attempts to figure out how one blows one's brains out without leaving them everywhere. First he tries making a buffer zone out of pillows in bed. This is patently useless. Then he goes to wrap himself in the shower curtain. He slips in the tub. Eventually a sleeping bag is introduced, at which point the phone rings and he has to give up—fighting his way out of the sleeping bag—to answer it. I'm not quite sure what this says about human nature, but I fear it's profound.
I have no idea how closely the film resembles its source novel by Christopher Isherwood, but considered simply as a movie, I think it's one of the best new things I've seen in theaters this year.2 The criticism that its style overrides its substance misses the point. The style is entirely in service of placing the viewer inside George's head, his autopilot dissociation from the present that sharpens momentarily into full color as a word, a look, a Krakatoa smog-haze of sunset catches his eye and pulls him briefly into the world, his mounting inability to keep his life with Jim—the sweet and the painful memories both—from bleeding up into the neatly compartmentalized minutiae of his daily routine, even as he prepares to render the whole question moot with an old service pistol and some newly purchased bullets.3 And it shouldn't be, but it's still rare to see a gay character's sexuality treated so matter-of-factly in a mainstream film; I don't have the technical vocabulary to articulate it properly, but the point I want to make is that while the default of the film's world is not gay, the film's default is. The camera is always someone's eye and here it's George's. And the director, Tom Ford, dedicated A Single Man to Richard Buckley, his partner of twenty-three years.
Incidentally, both posters I've seen for the movie are misleading. Julianne Moore's Charley is certainly an important presence in George's life and potentially last day, but the face haunting over his shoulder should have been Matthew Goode's. Jim was not a substitute for anything, do you understand? And there is no substitute for Jim. Anywhere.
1. It is a credit to the film and the actors that although Jim is never onscreen except in dreams and photographs and memory flashes, we understand exactly why George is falling apart without him.
2. I have to specify; I've seen a number of movies in theaters this past year, but most of them were things like Z (1969), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (1989), The Red Shoes (1948), and M. Hulot's Holiday (1953). All hail art houses.
3. There is a beautifully gallows-funny scene in which George, who desires his suicide to be as orderly, unfussy, and as little in need of clean-up as possible, attempts to figure out how one blows one's brains out without leaving them everywhere. First he tries making a buffer zone out of pillows in bed. This is patently useless. Then he goes to wrap himself in the shower curtain. He slips in the tub. Eventually a sleeping bag is introduced, at which point the phone rings and he has to give up—fighting his way out of the sleeping bag—to answer it. I'm not quite sure what this says about human nature, but I fear it's profound.
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