1-21-10 Movie Review: A Single Man

Jim Erickson liked the lead performance in this week's movie better than the movie itself.
PLEASE NOTE: The showing of The Wiz at the Orpheum on 1/21 is at 7:00 P.M., not 7:30 as stated in the feature.

Two noncommercial movie offerings over the next seven days, both a little unusual. The Orpheum Third Thursday series tonight is showing The Wiz, a modernized black version of The Wizard of Oz starring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross, with Lena Horne, Nipsy Russell, and Richard Pryor, based on a Broadway play; The Wiz shows at 7:00 tonight in the Orpheum. And the Murdock Theatre's French series tomorrow night is showing City of Lost Children, from 1995, a fantasy about a scientist who keeps invading the dreams of children because he can't dream himself. Leonard Maltin calls City of Lost Children a marvel of production design, with sumptuous visuals and painstaking invention," and it shows at 7:30 Friday in the Murdock Theatre, 536 North Broadway.

And commercially, we have a marvelous lead performance but not a lot more in A Single Man.

Colin Firth is considered a near cinch for an Academy Award nomination for his lead role, and he probably deserves one. He plays a 52-year-old English professor who has just lost his male lover and is seriously contemplating suicide. The part is made unusually difficult by the fact that Firth plays a man who says he never woke up joyfully and who, the year being 1962, has had to train himself to conceal his emotions so he could remain in the closet. He can relax and act natural only with his best surviving friend, Julianne Moore, who is also alone and getting tired of it. It's impressive how varied Firth can make this character's emotions when he doesn't dare show reactions even to the sexual advances he is continually encountering from both sexes. But it's hard for him to make his character particularly sympathetic except as a victim of social prejudice, and the character himself is not very interesting.

Our sympathies are also limited by the circumstances surrounding him. A Single Man is one of those movies in which every car in the parking lot is freshly scrubbed and polished, every street has been swept and scrubbed, every room is a showcase, every desk either bare and polished or organized like a showcase. With the exception of a bartender who is losing his hair but i not overweight, I can remember no human being who is not slim, trim, and beautiful. Director Tom Ford used to be a fashion designer, and I imagine those who know clothes could comment on the costumes, too. And if anybody is within my pay range, their houses don't show it. Add to all this a sexual appeal that is obviously widely recognized, and it is hard to see that Firth, eight months after his lover died, has recovered no farther then to be contemplating suicide; a lot of people are left with less than he has.

Shifts between bright colors and subdued ones don't seem entirely consistent, though there is a tendency for bright colors to appear, both in objects and photography itself, at moments when something positive occurs and in memory flashes, a device a little too obvious to be very effective, and the varying degrees of drabness may be determined by a principle that escaped me. All in all, A Single Man photographed the world in a manner I couldn't believe in, even as a psychological device. Entertainment Weekly's Owen Glieberman described it as "suffused with beauty...a movie conceived in a swoon," though he admired it for it, and rated A Single Man A-. But the person I talked to after the show agreed with me that all it has is Colin Firth's performance.

Which may be enough, especially if you also appreciate physical beauty for its own sake.