A Single Man - Tom Ford

“Even the music makes me want to kill myself,” said a man a few rows down from me during the closing credits. I laughed; sometimes someone just says it all.

But being depressing is only one of the problems with A Single Man, helmed by fashion designer-turned-director Tom Ford. Watching it, you can see that Ford has an impressive eye, but maybe not for movies. He opens with a shot of Colin Firth drifting naked in the ocean, in a state of limbo that well prepares us for what follows; from the very beginning the film is trapped in a state of dreary suspension, a frosty lacquer of style without substance.

No, maybe not. There may be substance in this story, set during the Cuban Missile Crisis and containing dialogue passages about fear, loneliness, and regret, but whatever meaning there is struggles to breathe under Ford’s lugubrious direction. Especially in the first half his film is overwhelmed by slow motion, extreme close-ups, clothes, tableaus, and an oppressive, narcotic score that has the effect described above. The photography is self-consciously de-saturated to reflect the somber mood, and then brightens when we’re shown memories of happier times, or a moment flush with attraction in the present; the effect is simplistic, and too readily apparent to be effective; when the color is vibrant we know it’s code for happy, and when it drains we know we’re being told to feel sad.

Ford designs compositions, not scenes. They’re painstaking detailed — the camera slowly panning up on a girl in a blue dress, a high-contrast black-and-white scene of two lovers on a rock cliff, the eyes and lips of students in a lecture hall — but for all their heightened elegance they’re flat and superficial. He’s aiming for existential angst, but his film looks and sounds like a Calvin Klein fragrance commercial.

Firth plays college English professor George Falconer — a moment to consider the instant mystique of a name like Professor Falconer, who sounds like he should be a bookish fighter pilot or adventuring ornithologist — who we learn at the outset has lost Jim (Matthew Goode), his lover of sixteen years, to a deadly car accident. Perhaps you will be as surprised as I was to learn the duration of their romance; both actors look the same age in all of their flashbacks, even the scene of their very first meeting, and Goode, only thirty-two, doesn’t look old enough to have begun an adult relationship sixteen years ago. This may seem like nit-picking, but without a consistent sense of the passage of time, their steady, committed relationship plays more like a whirlwind affair.

The film takes place over one day of George’s life. A revolver is introduced in the early scenes, and it becomes clear that this is the day he intends to kill himself. As he makes his preparations (teaches his last class, empties his safe deposit box), he happens upon men who look like they walked out of ... well, a Tom Ford fashion shoot. One is his student Kenny, played by Nicholas Hoult, who has come a long way since playing the awkward child from 2002’s About a Boy. Now 20, Hoult has grown into a young man of lean build, angular face, and androgynous beauty, which Ford favors with loving camerawork. George then meets Carlos (Jon Kortajarena), a Spanish hustler dressed like James Dean. They share a tender scene that isn’t convincing, because Kortajarena is so meticulously styled, dressed, and posed that he never seems like a person. He’s a still photo from an Armani spread.

George’s best friend is Charley (Julianne Moore), a fellow British expat who has romantic history with George and still harbors feelings. She is a divorcee and the mother of a grown child who has left the nest. They bond over their shared alienation, but Charley doesn’t develop into a complete character much more than Kenny or Carlos. They get together to drink and commiserate. There are odd moments of frivolous laughter and dancing. They air grievances. They’re full of ennui and oh so chic, but there’s nothing especially compelling about their relationship; we’ve seen this sort of gay-man-straight-woman co-dependency before.

All the while the Cuban Missile Crisis sits in the background, barely an afterthought to the screenplay written by Ford and David Scearce, from a novel by Christopher Isherwood. During a class discussion of Brave New World, George describes cultural fears real and imagined, but he can’t be bothered to listen as a colleague discusses possible nuclear war; he’s distracted by the glistening bodies of tennis players. Such is the film.

Watch a trailer for the film here: