Agenda Movie Club: A Single Man

A Single Man

Tom Ford

2009

What do we do when the other one dies? Sooner or later, one of the two of us will have to find out, barring some bizarre accident. What then?

And is it better or worse to love a person who’s still alive, but who cannot love you the way you really want?

There are moments in this movie that will make you ache. It is true what they say, Colin Firth is amazing here, and better than he is in The King’s Speech. (This is more a function of the fact that he has far more complex emotions and nuance to show here, not that he’s actually “better” or “worse” in one of the movies.) He does this “I’m trying to smile but there’s so much sadness inside me” thing that’s just devastating. My goodness.

I’m not mad that Jeff Bridges beat him, because I loved Bridges, too, but now I do understand what got everyone so worked up. He’ll go ahead and beat Bridges this year, which is also fine.

But the movie. I can’t really convey how touching it is (and that’s the word everyone seems to want to use, because it’s fitting), there are so many real and tough emotions here, and almost entirely due to Firth’s performance (Julianne Moore is excellent, too). I thought it was strange, but a lot of the film reminded me of Little Children– not because of the subject matter (not really the same at all), but because of how quirky and unexpectedly funny the style of the movie is. I expected a straight-ahead drama, and that’s not what is here.

Even so, this made me ache.

Two things I didn’t love: the jump-cuts and the ending. I didn’t mind the lighting shifts that we see, I thought they did a good job of showing how Firth saw the world and little ways that others could affect him. The jump-cuts I didn’t understand and they distracted me a bit. And the ending distracted me a lot. Why did he have to die? It’s too ironic that he decides not to kill himself (although I think he was never ready to kill himself, as we saw in the sequence when he fusses again and again with finding just the right way to position before shooting himself in the mouth) and then goes ahead and has a heart attack. That just seemed so manufactured that it took me out of a movie that had really absorbed me up to that point. It didn’t feel necessary. Besides, it’s always far more interesting to me to think about how people will continue living with whatever difficulties or epiphanies they might have after the credits roll. I like that.

But that was only the last couple minutes of what is really a very lovely movie. And one that makes me wonder: do I hope I go first?