The plaintive violins and robust trombones in the last four measures of Jean Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony, his final symphony, a symphony of one unbreakable movement, surge and undulate until a conclusion — described by musical theorist Arnold Whittall as “triumphantly abrupt” – in which the music not as much ends but ceases into lingering nothingness.
Everyone has a soundtrack for grief. That is mine. But that’s in the abstract. In reality, we likely don’t want to hear a thing while we mourn, we don’t wish to be reminded of the loss by a melody. George Falconer – the newly single man of Christopher Isherwood’s evocative novel and Tom Ford’s touching debut motion picture – can’t pick up an album in his Los Angeles home without freezing from the instantaneously heartbreaking memory of Jim. It’s November 1962, and only eight months have passed since the death of his partner of 16 years on a snowy Colorado road. He puts the album down; there are no revolutions for the phonograph yet. At the most recent weekly dinner with his longtime friend Charley — a fellow expatriate and the woman who consoled him on the evening he received the tragic news — George (Colin Firth) resolves to abide by an early New Year’s Resolution to simply “let go of the past.” So when he dances, he moves to the present. George and Charley gyrate in her opulent living room to Green Onions, released in August of 1962 and therefore debuting after his partner’s death so there’s no chance the song can provoke the past.
Still, George mourns. He finds himself prying his body out of bed in the morning. Unenthused, as his feet hit the floor, he falls into the routine of readying himself for teaching college literature. An Englishman, with a home on the West Coast for close to a quarter century, the sartorially splendid George armors himself with professorial effect. He has become, in the past months, a mannequin of tearless grief, and cloaked despondency inside. At the college, he walks across campus with a colleague (Pushing Daisies’ Lee Pace), engaged in a conversation but only peripherally as he focuses on the alluring bodies of two toned student tennis players. George has become a match of intellect versus sensation, a battle between the temporal and the everlasting. In his classroom, he lets the class prattle on about the themes of immortality in Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan as he remains distracted by, well, everything. One student, Kenny, who remains quiet during the discussion, intrigues George (and unknowingly comforts him) when after class he confides in George that he’s naturally uncertain, befuddled by the past, present and future. Kenny (portrayed very nicely by Nicholas Hoult, who’s grown into a young actor of significance since his About a Boy appearance) is earnest and grasping but not desperate or clingy. His genuine discombobulation parallels George’s palpable sense of upheaval.
Jim remains a potent presence throughout the film. In flashback, Matthew Goode is warm, generous and gorgeous as Jim. Goode, who was so majestic in the sadly little-seen The Lookout and so misused in the bombastic Watchmen, is technically remarkable with his true accent undetectable in his American one. But what makes Goode such a strong actor is his effortless versatility. He’s endowed with the dashing good looks to play heartthrobs and possesses the talent to play darker, more complex characters. In A Single Man, despite a supporting role, he conveys the depth of devotion he felt for George, and makes one fully realize how much these men loved each other.
Photographed in cool light and swathed in diffuse colors, A Single Man is filmed at times as though through a finely shrouded gauze. The secluded, tree-shaded, open-floor planned modern home that George now shares with no one is accentuated with rosewood and teak. There’s a tenderness and consideration to the visual style Ford gives this tinted California, and his graceful direction – where he combines the perpetual-sunset veneer with emotionally meaningful moments — is highlighted by a brief encounter. On the way to Charley’s for dinner, George stops at a liquor store and literally bumps into Carlos, by all appearances a hustler. The brief role is played by Jon Kortajarena, a Spanish model with cheekbones like the edges of a hollowed out butternut squash, in a fine film debut. Shot with a dramatic backdrop, the scene doesn’t play out as expected and the kind, sweet vibe of the sequence is significant given its brevity.
Once he arrives for supper and cocktails, and makes it through her hallway of orange plants which is less a foyer than a grove, George and the gregarious Charley engage in the easy banter and simultaneously unrestrained personal condemnations of confidants. Verbal jabs, both those planned and those unintentionally landed and instantly apologized for, can be shared and absorbed between really good, seasoned friends. Julianne Moore, a marmalade minx decidedly less frumpy than her novel counterpart but no less sad, emotes her self pity with a forced laugh and an impeccably unforced English accent. She and Firth engage in illuminating abreactions and the script by Ford and co-writer David Scearce here crackles with witty, charged and substantial dialogue.
Later that same night, at the same bar where he first met Jim, but now a far different watering hole two decades on, George runs into Kenny for a drink. Kenny, who doesn’t know anything specifically about George’s loss, wonders if his teacher has learned anything from life’s experiences. George thinks, perhaps he hasn’t, and that he’s just become “sillier and sillier” It is in these scenes where Firth allows George, without forced alterations to the character, to let down his guard, even more so than he’d imagine with Charley. Vitally, Firth connects us to George’s attempts at catharsis. Both the novel and the film poignantly convey the common experience of mourning. We all fear death, and are connected by our collective dread at its inexorable presence and its irreversible legacy. But our grief is ours, alone.
