A Single Man (2009) film review & summary

RATING: SOFT 8/10

The threat of nuclear warfare and the incoming Cuban Missile Crisis cannot stop George (Colin Firth) from thinking about a single man. George is but a single man, a British one at that, living as an outsider in America—for when the film takes place, which is in the early 1960s—in many ways, both as a foreign-national and by way of his sexuality. And a single man is what George is after the shock death of his longtime lover Jim (Matthew Goode), leaving him devastated and existentially soul-searching throughout the entirety of A Single Man (2009).

George admonishes his previous lover and current–albeit seemingly reluctantly so–best-friend Charley (Julianne Moore) for treating the past as her future, looking forward to days that will shape themselves into a familiar silhouette of comfort and stability. But this is exactly what George is enduring himself, in a figurative, implicit manner, but also through director Tom Ford’s visual storytelling. Anecdotes are interwoven into unfolding events to create a fluid narrative where time continuously seems as though it is of the essence, but simultaneously loses all importance.

George is between a rock and a hard place in A Single Man, life is painful to live without his companion who was taken away for reasons that only the divine knows, but his chosen alternative is death, a similarly painful but disparately conclusive decision that provides a closure he cannot attain while breathing. George does find moments of warmth in the coldness of the film; instances where Ford floods the screen with color in an otherwise gaunt color palette. Conversations and sensual jousting with a James Dean-esque-vagabond in Carlos (Jon Kortajarena) and a university pupil of his (Nicholas Hoult) provide bursts of intimate fulfillment that someone like Charley cannot give George anymore. As he puts it–a sentiment which Charley reaffirms–his encounters with women were part of George’s directionless past and men are ultimate indicators of his mature present and future. But with the loss of Jim, the value of hard-earned love becomes forsaken for cheap thrills that keep George satiated enough to put off the inevitable self-enforced death sentence that he has imposed upon himself.

To the viewer, A Single Man shows what seems to be a normal day in the life of George Falconer, a Stanford professor, upper-class suburbanite, but the inquiries of concern from close acquaintances and strangers alike confirms the exponentially increasing suspicion that our protagonist is on the edge of collapse. A booming strings score follows George around, just as his devastation does, continuously reaching climatic crescendos that yearn to be interrupted by definitive moments of action. These intrusions never arrive because George cannot sit still long enough to ruminate on their justification; suicide is just as performative to him as is keeping up the façade of contentedness in his life full of bourgeoise despair.

All of this is good and well when the consequences of what is or is not done can be negotiated on his own terms, but George eventually finds out that time is always a factor, whether one likes it or not, and that agency can be exploited to an extent but its inadvertent ramifications will rear their ugly head if it is abused. And while Ford ties A Single Man together in what is almost a negative deus ex machina, the majority of the film exhibits a concisely poignant philosophical discussion over the futility of individualism in the face of uncontrollable factors, insisting that the audience enjoy their lives with urgency.