
With
A Single Man,
renowned fashion designer Tom Ford does what he knows – shoot in an
immaculately beautiful, excessively chic style that’s fit for a men’s cologne
commercial. The trouble is that his film, an adaptation of Christopher
Isherwood’s novel, has a plot and characters rather than just pretty surfaces
to gussy up with all manner of cinematographic embellishments, and thus requires
more than incessant slow-motion and escalating orchestral music to pass as
serious drama. From a black-and-white flashback in which two romantically
involved men pose on a wind-swept rock outcropping as if the subjects of a
magazine ad for khakis, to a sequence in which heartbroken and closeted professor
George (Colin Firth) is hit on at a gas station by an impossibly good-looking
Spanish hunk, Ford’s film places superficial appearances over story or thematic
depth at every turn. True, his material – about George’s efforts, in ‘60s L.A.,
to cope with the death of his lover (Matthew Goode) – is concerned with issues
of truths concealed underneath manicured exteriors, yet there’s rarely a moment
when Ford’s directorial affectations feel inherently tied to his tale’s
underlying concerns, most of which wind up openly articulated by George during
a classroom lecture on the nature of minority invisibility. A fantastic Firth
taps deep reservoirs of grief and remorse and Julianne Moore, as the gaudy,
wayward mess of a best friend who pines for George, brings a sloppy charm and style
to the neat-and-tidy proceedings. Yet Ford so thoroughly favors self-conscious
aesthetics over interior and interpersonal dynamics that
A Single Man resonates as more demo reel than actual narrative
feature.
Agree. It was dreadful. I actually began to actively hope for the George character's death, just so the self-important, empty tediousness would end. When About a Boy pulled him from the waves, I suppressed a groan. When he died on his bedroom floor, I pleaded "please don't let that kid come in and resuscitate him." And yes, the abuse of the slow motion button on the editing console deserves a special mention.
This was the first time I even thought little of Colin Firth's acting. With the inept, style-obsessed direction, he conveyed little more than bland, doughy melancholy. There was random idiocy, too, like a little girl commenting on his bushy eyebrows, when his eyebrows were not, and anyway were completely invisible behind his thick black-framed glasses.
Possibly the only positive about this movie: it made me appreciate Mad Men even more. Clearly, not everyone can make 60s angst interesting.
Posted by: Ally | January 19, 2010 at 04:54 PM