“
Christopher Isherwood & Don Bachardy,” by David Hockney, 1968 <Spoilers!>I saw
A Single Man this morning and still feel somewhat shell-shocked. It’s probably too early for me to review it. It’s still too raw. I need more time to think about it. And thinking about it is exactly what I can’t seem to stop doing.
More a meditation than a movie,
A Single Man came close to being a perfect movie for me.
I was entirely enveloped within George’s grief. Colin Firth made George’s grief palpable. It was so overpowering, I could practically taste it. I wanted to embrace George. Embrace him and tell him that he had so many blessings. Embrace him and tell him that “time heals all wounds”, even though I would have felt shamefully unqualified to do so. I empathized emphatically with George in his searing, all-engulfing grief. His tragic, lonely, empty, impeccably groomed, immaculate,
single life.
Though its primary theme is death and mourning, I found it ultimately abandoned those restrictions, and subsequently transfigured into a celebration of the resilience of the human spirit.
The film is sad. Tragic. No getting around that. However, I did not find it to be a tear-jerker. I was probably too overcome by George’s melancholy to find it necessary to produce tears of my own.
Colin Firth deserves the Academy Award for his performance. In fact, I would go so far as to say that he should be awarded the Academy Award solely for his performance in the telephone notification scene alone. An amazing performance. Bravo, Mr Firth.
I loved the music (thought it was Glass, later found out it wasn’t), the mood/colour changes, sets, costumes, 60s hair and panda eye-makeup, and the total evocation of the 60s. I was there! I remember! All that ghastly, ever-present cigarette smoke! Yetch!
I loved George’s house and my heart went out to him and his anal-retentive obsessive-compulsive psychosis. The last time I saw drawers as neat as that was when I looked inside one of my own.
Previously, I said that
A Single Man “came close” to being a perfect movie. The one thing that detracted from what should have been perfection for me (and I fear I’m going to come under attack from some pretty heavy artillery for what I’m about to say) was Nicholas Hoult’s Kenny. He was just too pretty for words. Those big pink ever-moist lips. The soft doeful eyes. The fluffy blow-dried hair. The girly sweater. The little boy’s bottom. I was just completely turned off by this older professor / pretty young student scenario. Too many clichés. Too much ammunition for the fag-haters who shriek their bile and their malevolent bilge about dirty old queers wanting to have their way with pretty young men.
And I wasn’t convinced by Kenny’s character. He looked sly to me. I thought all along that he was playing a game with George, involving a bet with his girlfriend (I forget her name – the smoking blond in the lecture theatre), that he would be able to bed George. It was not to eventuate, but I’m not convinced that this wasn’t his initial aim. It was only after he found George’s suicide preparations that his original intentions were diverted.
I have no argument with the presence of a game-playing Kenny character, per se; i.e., a sexually ambivalent/experimental/curious younger man. I would have just personally preferred that he was not soooooo pretty.
A Single Man is wonderful on so many levels. For example, I loved the appearance of the owl towards the end of the film. The ancient Romans believed owls were the harbingers of death. If George was an Oxford or Cambridge Classics scholar, as I suspect he may have been, he would have known what that owl in his garden signified. I thought the owl was a lovely finishing touch to a beautiful film.
I’ll be seeing it again and I’ll be reading the book too.