The Gown Student Newspaper at Queen's University Belfast

REVIEW: A Single Man

Tom Ford’s ‘A Single Man’ is a visually beautiful film whose shots linger over its subject matter with a studious intensity, reminding us that Ford is a designer and aesthete first, and a filmmaker second. It tells the tale of ‘light in his loafers’ lecturer George Falconer (Colin Firth) as he negotiates an L.A. day, typical but for the fact that George has decided this will be his very last day alive.

BY RIONNAGH SHERIDAN

www.queensfilmtheatre.com

Failing to recover from the death of his partner Jim (Matthew Goode), and haunted by imagined memories of the car crash that killed him, George repeatedly disconnects from the world around him as it tries to engage with him. A student, Kenny, (Nicholas Hoult) tries to seduce him, his gin-soaked friend Charley (Julianne Moore) hopelessly attempts to rekindle their relationship, and Spanish hustler Carlos (Jon Kortajerena) fails to pick up George in an L.A.-polluted carpark. Firth carries the film superbly, and is definitely worthy of the Oscar nomination he has received for his role. His portrayal of George is alternately gruff, sensitive and always multi-layered.
The film fails on some small points: the threat of the Cuban missile crisis is amateurishly handled, the movement of people onscreen is limited and bears more of a resemblance to a fashion-shoot tableau at times, and George’s suicide attempt is embarrassing as he struggles to shoot himself inside a sleeping bag.
As Tom Ford says, this is a film which simply looks at George while he does very little, and revels in the tiniest of quotidian details. This is a slow-moving film that revels self-consciously in its own aesthetics. While criticism has been drawn from many quarters on the unsubtle colour changes in Colin Firth’s face, which becomes leached of colour at important junctures, it remains a beautiful and colourful film to watch. Overall, it is a fascinating adaptation of the Christopher Isherwood novel and well worth a trip to the cinema.

A Single Man opens Friday 12th February in the QFT

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Arts + Ents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.