Oh, children, can't you see I'm sinking like a stone?

[sovay]

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.

Comments

[sovay]

a metaphor for the world that George inhabits, dulled by his irreplaceable loss, dim with grief, except for those moments where life slips in through the cracks and reveals the beauty that once was, infusing the screen with color and light and the lushness of living before fading once again, like the sun slipping behind a cloud.

Yes. Beautifully described. I loved that so much.

It is a fantastic film and I so hope that Colin will win the Oscar, but I likewise fear that he shall not. Siiiiiiiiigh.

I haven't seen Crazy Heart, but I trust rushthatspeaks when she says that Jeff Bridges was better in Tideland (2005).

[ericmvan.livejournal.com]

As much as I shared your love for Frith's performance, I actually agree with the consensus that Bridges deserves to win. Start with the fact that he does his own singing (and at least faked the guitar playing convincingly) and performs with precisely the correct amount of charisma for his character, a former major country star who is now playing bowling alleys to crowds of thirty or forty. You can imagine the extras who comprised that audience going home and answering the question "so, how was Bad Blake?" with "well, he was drunk as hell and looked like it too, but, actually he was kinda great." I don't think that was easy to pull off and in fact it's profoundly convincing.

When you add that to a non-musical performance that was every bit as convincing as Frith's (and really not too dissimilar, in that the best and most memorable moments are silences and expressionless masks which crack and leak out pain), I have to give him the statue.

[sovay]

Start with the fact that he does his own singing (and at least faked the guitar playing convincingly) and performs with precisely the correct amount of charisma for his character . . . When you add that to a non-musical performance that was every bit as convincing as Frith's (and really not too dissimilar, in that the best and most memorable moments are silences and expressionless masks which crack and leak out pain), I have to give him the statue.

I hope I am misreading you, because the argument you appear to be making I find so incomprehensible, I am not sure where to begin dismantling it. You seem to be arguing that Jeff Bridges and Colin Firth deliver performances of comparable emotional and dramatic impact, but the fact that Bridges can sing gives him a qualitative edge. I don't see why you consider him to have exceeded some sort of standard. The character is a professional musician. The actor portraying him had damn well better be able to sing. The conviction of the performance depends on it. I agree that not all actors are singers and not all singers are actors; someone who can do both equally well in character is formidable. But in a role that requires musicianship, doing your own singing is not something you should win awards for. It's either part of your skill set or it isn't (or you're Rex Harrison, in which case you have the vocal range of a walnut, but it works for you). It wasn't part of Marion Cotillard's skill set and she won for Édith Piaf. Kevin Kline is a far better singer than Cole Porter and so far as I know he wasn't even nominated for De-Lovely. I shall refrain from listing further examples, but I hope you see my point.

[ericmvan.livejournal.com]

You are misreading me, although I could have stated it more clearly. I've seen plenty of actors recently who did their own singing and I've given neither Bridges nor his predecessors extra points for it. I was entirely talking about how precisely he nails the quality of every aspect of the performances. He is playing a guy whom we can tell used to be a completely riveting performer, and now he's old and a wreck but you can see that he used to be great and in many ways still is. It's nuance, body language; it's challenging enough to capture the charisma of a ficticious star but even more challenging when that star is partially but grievously eclipsed.

Think about the emotional complexities of playing to forty people in a bowling alley when you used to play to thousands, and doing it while so drunk that at one ill-timed point you have to leave the stage to vomit. Do you give it your all? Does that fill you with self-loathing, or do you somehow still keep some pride? It would have been so, so easy to play "this guy's not any good any more" and play it for pathos and I think that's the way this script is played 99 times out of 100. To play "in a lot of important ways this guy's still incredibly good" and make that completely believable, that's a rare feat. I have seen that performance (I'm thinking Alex Chilton at the Rat c. 1977) and I recognized it. I hadn't seen it in a movie before, even though I've seen plenty of movies where I should have.