For some reason I thought this film was going to be good: perhaps I conflated it with the previous, inspired films featuring Julianne Moore on a kitsch-banal suburban backdrop: Far From Heaven, Safe.
Well I was wrong - A Single Man is singularly awful. The whole texture of the film is sterile, stilted, dry and contrived. Every scene feels like a magazine spread, and here’s the problem: the script-writer, producer and director are all Tom Ford, the famous fashion designer. And this is the worst kind of self-indulgent pet-project.
I noticed that the camera is almost always still in this film. It is a sequence of meticulously constructed tableaux (once again: magazine spread is the inevitable association), in which actors move or barely move, carefully trying not to rumple the clothes or mess up the coiffure that some poor assistant has undoubtedly just put the finishing touches on. I found the constant attention to hair and clothes irritating and distracting, but not distracting enough to hide the vacuousness of the script.
It’s painterly film-making gone too far, or perhaps taken from the wrong end of things. The carefully composed images in this film are generally not used to tell the story, or give depth to the characters: they’re just pretty images. There are about 10 times in the film where the shot cuts to a close-up of the cigarette that someone is smoking. But this isn’t used as a symbol or metaphor: it’s just a glamorous cultural image, thrown in because it seems cool and arty. The film’s main attempt to use imagery meaningfully is through a fiddle with the colour balance: it is usually very cold and blue, but when the protagonist feels some warmth of emotion, the colour balance suddenly turns up to a warm orange glow. I found this affect clumsy and laboured; for me it just drew attention to the absence of any more subtle means of visual story-telling.
Both Colin Firth and Julianne Moore put in brave performances, for which they’ve been much applauded. But they were struggling against some leaden material. In fact I think that Firth’s performance works because he stoically puts up with so many crap scenes of light gay erotica, and this stoic expression happens to suit the character and story quite well.
Ultimately, I was somewhat fascinated by the particular way in which A Single Man disappointed me. It lacked the mobility, nuance and unpredictability of human life; it was a Vogue magazine instead of a novel. Perhaps it showed me something about the difference between art and design.
For a more articulate and less grumpy review, see the Village Voice.
Post a Comment