AWARD NOMINATIONS:
82nd Annual Academy Awards: Best Actor in a Leading Role: Colin Firth
2010 Golden Globes:
Best Performance by an Actor: Colin Firth
Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role: Julianne Moore
Best Original Score: Abel Korzeniowski
SYNOPSIS:
Set in Los Angeles in 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, A SINGLE MAN is the story of George Falconer (Colin Firth), a 52-year-old British college professor who is struggling to find meaning to his life after the death of his longtime partner, Jim (Matthew Goode). George dwells on the past and cannot see his future as we follow him through a single day, where a series of events and encounters ultimately leads him to decide if there is a meaning to life after Jim. George is consoled by his closest friend Charley (Julianne Moore), a 48-year-old beauty who is wrestling with her own questions about the future. A young student of George's, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), who is coming to terms with his true nature, stalks George as he feels in him a kindred spirit. A SINGLE MAN is a romantic tale of love interrupted, the isolation that is an inherent part of the human condition, and ultimately the importance of the seemingly smaller moments in life. Directed and co-written by acclaimed fashion designer Tom Ford (making his feature debut), based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood.
REVIEW:
There is a certain madness in the shock of grieving over a loved one who has passed that manifests itself in particular ways. Colin Firth interprets those emotions intuitively in the captivating A SINGLE MAN. Firth portrays George, a tenured literature professor at a mid-level California university in 1962. As an expatriate from Britain, he has barely adapted to the different ways of his new homeland. As the film opens, he is shown in a strange situation where he is approaching an automobile that has skidded in snowstorm. A man has been thrown from the vehicle. George kisses him.
It is learned later that Jim (Matthew Goode), his lover of 16 years, had been killed in an automobile accident. Given that gay men were mostly closeted in this era, George is not welcome at the funeral. Cut off and stranded in a life without his partner, George must wake up to face the day and make some decisions of his own.
What follows is a twisted, almost surreal sadness of a day, as George meanders through and contemplates the life that is facing him. His only solace is his best friend, Charley (Julianne Moore), and perhaps the connection to a number of people and memories that evoke Jim. In his open wound state, George does have a vulnerability and spirit that makes him free, and in that freedom perhaps a path to redemption.
Writer/director Tom Ford, a notable fashion designer, makes a stunning debut as a film artist. His canvas is George’s despair, in which he paints a series of thought processes from the grieving man’s point of view. There are memories, dreams and meditations that illustrate the melancholy of loss, richly broadening the empathy for George’s 24 hour journey and his life as a gay man in 1962. It seems as much a personal project as professional, and succeeds in both arenas because of Ford’s unique imprint. We will face our remaining days much like a ledger sheet, with profits and losses checked off as each fiscal year is applied. And perhaps down that path there will be so sudden a loss that any recovery from it will be based on how much courage we have left to recover. hollywoodchicago.com
