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By any accepted measuring of cinematic reality, this should have been something much, more worse. Tom Ford, a fashion designer who made his name at Yves San Laurent and Gucci, makes his feature film directing debut here, in an extremely loose adaptation of the Christopher Isherwood novel. Colin Firth, at the top of his already-impressive game, stars as George, a British professor teaching at some deglamorized unnamed school in what appears to be -- what with the beaches, and all the smog and neurotic soul-searching going on -- California. The time is 1962, with the threat of Cuban-based Soviet nukes in the air, as well as a slightly dangerous hint of the social rebellions soon to come.
George recently lost his love of several years, Jim (a mellow Matthew Goode). The crushing blow leaves George utterly adrift in his lazy, hazy, Huxley-reading atmosphere. He perplexes his students with amiably drifting rambles on the nature of life and whatnot, and occasionally visits his souse of a friend from Old Blighty, Charlotte (Julianne Moore, blazing through in a high-camp cameo), who would probably bleed gin if you pricked her.
Ford (who also co-wrote the screenplay) sets up for himself a tough road to follow here, and indeed George more often than not drifts backward into the past when he had his Jim. That past is done in cozy Technicolor joy, while the present is mostly leached of color. George speaks often of being invisible, a state of being that has plenty to do with he and Jim's being relatively discreet about their relationship. Now, with the love of his life gone forever, mild-mannered George, with his diffident manner and polite little cigarettes, seems on the verge of disappearing altogether. For a time the movie threatens to do just the same.
Somehow, though, Ford begins to weave something more lasting of a story here than a smartly-attired period piece. Yes, everything looks placed just so, from George's mid-century modern bungalow to his sporty roadster (both suspiciously unattainable for a teacher at the kind of nowhere school he's teaches at). But the slight drift of a story, in which George sinks further into a slough of despond and plans meticulously for an orderly little suicide, begins to catch and tug at you in unexpectedly wrenching ways. Even an initially irritating subplot about a student of George's who develops some sort of obsession with him, starts to take on darker and more resonant tones.
A Single Man is a film that nearly boils over with a grand romantic keening so intense that it might elicit an eye-roll here and there, but the work as a whole is never anything less than sincere. In any case, most possible qualms about the film's deficits are compensated for by the singularly masterful job done here by Firth, who renders clenched-jaw bleakness passively at first but then with an increasing sense of reckless, impetuous despair. He's willing to die for love.
