Film: "A Single Man" (2009)

A Single Man is the film that first-time director Tom Ford has based on Christopher Isherwood beautiful, harsh novel of the same title: a novel about the fraility of love, even when it's of the unique, once-in-a-lifetime kind, and the inevitability of endings. It's also a book about the present as negotiation between memory (often idealised, as in the case of Charley's England) and the promise of the future (Kenny's youth and opennes to life).



The first thing to notice is that while relatively faithful to the novel's plot (with a couple of important exceptions that I will mention later), Ford creates a very personal style and language for this film, one that separates it quite distinctly from the terse, humorous, deliberately unsentimental tone of the book. It's a film that recreates early the atmosphere of early 1960s California and the small university town George inhabits with a precision and attention to detail (clothes, furniture, architecture, cars, objects, labels) that is deliberately nostalgic, bathed as it is in a sweeping, old-Hollywood soundtrack, but that also constantly points out to the constructed nature of that past.

While Isherwood wrotes the 1960s as a present (his own) from which the protagonist feels emotionally detached after losing his lover of 16 years, Jim, Ford re-creates a time that can only be remembered through the memory of other artefacts, films among them. Hitchcock looms large and not only in the gigantic billboard of Psycho that forms the background of one of the most oniric, original scenes of the film (not present in Isherwood'd book), but also in the North-by-Northwest-ish suits worn by George, in Charley's make-up scene, in the stunning modernist architecture of George and Jim's house, with its glass walls and windows, and its asymmetrical layout. And most of all in the saturated colours that mark the moments when George feels alive, only to fade back to grayish sepias when he retreats to his own broken self.

George's glamorous house is one of the most visible departures from the book (explained with the fact that apparently Jim was an architect and designed it, because it is certainly beyond the means of a small college professor!). Isherwood had given them a more suburban home, but still set a little apart from the rest of their increasingly white, middle-class, straight neighbourhood (he underlines in the book how different, more alternative and bohemian, it had been in the immediate post-war years) by making it accessible only though a small, seemingly unsafe bridge.

Also George's friend Charlotte (Charley)'s house is stunningly furnished and decorated as is the woman herself, interpreted by a ravishing (but elaborately made-up, thus literally "constructed") Julianne Moore. And beauty, fashion, glamour of places and characters (Colin Firth is the most average-looking member of the cast and that is saying something) are the most visible elements that differentiate the film from the novel, where instead Isherwood insisted on George's aging, mediocre looks, on Charley's middle-age and extra pounds.

I am not sure how I feel about Ford's choice of casting beautiful people and whether it's a deliberate attempt to meet the mainstream Hollywood he so obviously references, or the inevitable consequence of his designer sensibilities, or again whether he does so to separate his work from the original text. Perhaps a combination of all these things. Either way it works at the level of the film, it fits its overall style and language, although Isherwood's choice of writing about normal, unexceptional people is the braver one.

On the other hand, I must admit I am happy that Ford cut the most problematic part of the book, that is the scene of George's visit to the hospice where his old friend Doris is dying of cancer. Through this scene, Isherwood engages, through George's perspective, in one of the most mysoginistic descriptions of women and a female body I've ever read in any fiction. George's disgust for Doris's decaying body is of course a reflection of his hate for the fact that she and Jim had had an affair, but it also reveals a deep-seated mysoginy that the narrator explicitly explains as equating all women with "Woman the Enemy", "Bitch-Mother Nature," and that spills out in the way the protagonist views most female characters in the book.

Luckily, this dislike for the entire gender, all the more off-putting for contemporary readers, is eliminated from this film that fully embraces a male gay aesthetics (obvious, for example, in the way male bodies and faces are adoringly filmed, especially Nicholas Hoult's Kenny, in ways that remind us to many oterh gay images, other art), but that is not unfairly harsh on women and thus allows us to sympathise with the male characters and their desire for each other.

(As an aside, by eliminating the Doris/Jim past storyline, Ford also idealises Jim and George's memory of him, which I'm not sure I like as much, because George's love is all the more powerful as it takes into account and accepts Jim's mistakes and imperfections; it also reflects the real life break-up and reconciliation between Isherwood and his life partner Don Bachardy, which was the inspiration of the novel, as confirmed by Bachardy himself and Tom Ford in this interesting interview.)

Ford's George needs all our sympathy, because not only he's a man detached from the world and simply going through the motions of living after having lost his companion - as he was in the novel - but he's also a man who (and this is the other important difference with the book), has decided that the time has come for him to die. Elegantly and with understated English humour, Colin Firth's George prepares for suicide, carefully choosing and laying out the clothes for his funeral, writing letters to friends, leaving a generous tip for the maid, and making sure that everything settled, organised, that his departure will be without fuss, possibly not even creating too much of a mess when blowing off his own head.

While Isherwood's George is a man resigned to live the rest of his life as a performance, Ford's protagonist is resigned to put an end to the show. Life calls them both back in subtle and unexpected ways: neighbours' children, a friend's phonoe call, a tennis match, a young student's flirtation: Nicholas Hoult's perfomance is the standout among an impeccable cast, in my view. It's quite the opposite of the jaded, wordly, vulnerable arrogance of his manipulative Tony Stonem from "Skins". Kenny is 100% American youth, from his impermeability (tone-deafness) to George's self-deprecating British humour, to the earnestness of his hopes and desires; he's still heart-breakingly seductive, but his seduction is accomplished through clear eyes and an open smile that doesn't hide a smirk.

But while life tries to lure him back, George is also constantly pulled towards the past and the world of memories. Will he choose life or will he let it go for good? Will he find a way for colours to never fade back to sepia or will he stop looking for the same shade of green that belonged to Jim in the eyes of those around him?

I will not reveal the ending, except to say that I am glad it remains faithful to the novel, where it comes as unavoidable and perfect as the one true love.

ETA: Further thoughts on the elimination of Doris from the narrative and other related things.
While Ford certainly strives to make George a more conventionally likeable character than Isherwood had (at least from a contemporary perspective) by eliminating his more blatant dislike and fear of women, he still makes his anxieties obvious.

One example is the way George looks at Lois, Kenny's girlfriend, who seems to fascinate and intimidate him at the same time. She is portrayed as a sexually confident, Brigitte Bardot lookalike who wears pants, smokes in class and looks at men in the eye, without fear. She also lets her blond hair loose on her shoulders, something that is clearly a symbol of the new woman. This is important, because all other, older or more traditional women in the film keep their hair controlled in elaborate, at times almost surreal (the bank teller's) hairdos. In a Mad Men-like moment George even comments, in a complimentary way, on the very proper hairstyle of one of his secretaries, making her visibly unconfortable.

That we are at a watershed moment in American history, and that this includes a new way of thinking about gender relations, sexuality, youth culture, as well as History with capital H, is remarked in the film in many ways, starting from the presence of newsreeels about the Cuban Missile crisis.

In this sense Ford has made a film that looks at the 1960s from the awareness of the present time and who is commenting on the sense that decade would acquire only later on. For example, in his lecture George makes repeated use of the word "fear" - which is not present in the the novel - commenting on how hate for all minorities, visible and invisible, Communists or Blacks (he probabaly would have used the word Negroes, but Ford can't bring himself to make Colin Firth utter it), Jews or Others, is born out of fear. All true, but articulated with a self-awareness that is of today rather than of 1964.

This sense that we are witnessing an age of Significant Change, where George's retreat to past and memory may have to do with more than his missing Jim, is further underlined by the Psycho billboard. Now, Psycho is Hitchcock's own watershed film, the one where he moves his focus from the straight, self-assured masculinity of the Cary Grant/James Stewart heroes to the sexual anxiety of the Antony Perkins anti-hero/villain (I know he had questioned masculinity before, but here the anxiety becomes central and left unresolved, as well given a stylistic representation).

The billboard is a huge close-up of Janet Leigh's face as she screams in that scene that we, the viewers, know will eventually lead to the obscene and graphic annihilation of her naked female body (and bosy): here comes Doris. But what is even more interesting this reference to a film that is a concentrate of mysoginistic and homo-social anxieties, is the background of a film that uses mainly the colours, music and style Hitchcock had employed in the previous decade. This is the world George/Cary Grant inhabits and he's bewildered by "Elvis Presley's gyrating hips" (quotation from the film), James Dean types and young women with long, loose hair.

Suit and tie-wearing George fears change at least as much as he desires it and only comes to terms with it (up to a point) with Kenny, who wears tight pants and pastel-coloured angora sweaters that make him look very modern, feminine even. It is only when they are divested of their clothes, their masks, their "constructions" and dip naked into the ocean for a night time swim that George and Kenny can finally connect. The moment most saturated in colour is the one covered by the darkness of the sea at night.