Man Apart

Colin Firth leads Tom Ford's highly stylized debut feature.

by Sam Adams

GO FIRTH: George (Colin Firth) mourns his lover's death with Charley (Julianne Moore) in A Single Man.

[City Paper Grade: B- ]

As the fashion designer who pulled Gucci from the brink of bankruptcy, Tom Ford has plenty of experience making his subjects look good. But George (Colin Firth), the bereaved college professor at the center of A Single Man, is the worst-looking thing in the movie. His pallid, mottled skin is bathed in cold, hard light, making him seem drawn and haggard. It would take more than unflattering light to make Firth look unhandsome, but here he has the residual beauty of a man who is no longer sure what is keeping him alive.

The joy has been drained from George by the death of Jim (Matthew Goode), his lover of 16 years, in a car accident, a loss that leaves him utterly alone save for the attentions of his longtime friend and onetime lover, Charley (Julianne Moore), a bibulous divorcée who quietly nurses the hope that they will rekindle their relationship. Apart from that, the only important figure in his life is one of his students, played by Nicholas Hoult, who persistently worms his way into George's life, sensing an absence in need of filling.

As you'd expect, Ford's approach in his first feature film is heavily stylized, incorporating a variety of film stocks (or at least simulations thereof) and shifting color palettes from near black-and-white to boldly saturated, sometimes within the same scene. Borrowing heavily from Wong Kar-Wai and Derek Jarman, he uses discontiguous editing and varying speeds to convey George's dislocation, a strategy that also involves jamming in abrupt close-ups, often of women's mascara-rimmed eyes and frequently accompanied by the sounds of a string quartet. At times, it feels like a montage in search of a movie to surround it. The film's underlying eroticism and overpowering sensuality floods out everything else, until all that's left is a dissipating mood.

Ford knows how to handle his actors, at least the male ones. Moore's performance is overstated and clumsily edited, picking out the most extreme moments to give the character more than a touch of the grotesque. Firth is treated more sensitively, although the movie's characterization of him is sentimental and one-note. Much of his behavior amounts to high-toned wallowing, including his elaborate preparations for a neat and orderly suicide, an element absent from Christopher Isherwood's landmark source novel. Ford luxuriates in the details of his period setting, exploiting the Cuban Missile Crisis to add overtones of mortality and lingering on boys in mohair sweaters and Bardot-esque blondes. But the movie rarely gets below the surfaces he has worked so hard to construct.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

A Single Man | Directed by Tom Ford, A Weinsten Co. release, Opens Fri., Dec. 25, at Ritz at the Bourse