Movie Time! A Single Man

I was eagerly awaiting the release of Tom Ford’s A Single Man to home video. This was mostly because I love seeing suits on film and I had heard quite a bit about Tom Ford’s fashion back­ground having an influence on the film. Unfor­tu­nately, fashion seems to be all there is to this flick.

Colin Firth plays protag­onist George Falconer, an English professor whose partner died in a car accident. We follow him on a single day as he contem­plates suicide. Throughout the course of the day, nothing really happens. He meets an inter­ested student, comes across an incredibly handsome young Spanish fellow, meets up with his old friend Charley (Julianne Moore), and ends the night by having a drink with said inter­ested student and proceeding to take him home after a naked swim.

I’d like to get into a plot analysis and all that jazz, but the truth of the matter is that it’s really nothing more than a cursory char­acter study of a gay Englishman. As a movie, Ford creates some visually stunning images. As an appre­ciator of classic male fashion, I noticed the great attention to detail to the character’s wardrobe. George Falconer was one helluva dresser: impec­cable and tasteful. Ford’s use of satu­ration and desat­u­ration, while overused, was duly noted and appre­ciated as well. Sound, usually an underused and ignored part of film making, was finely utilized: the dramatic and wistful score, combined with the stunning imagery, almost stands to say volumes on its own.

Unfor­tu­nately, it doesn’t say enough. I am a huge fan of char­acter studies. My own screenplay-turned novel is a char­acter study. That is why I know how difficult it is to write one. For a char­acter study to be successful, it must have conflict, and it must cause the audience to ask ques­tions. It must engage the viewer’s emotions and chal­lenge the intellect. The greatest diffi­culty lies in a char­acter study that doesn’t exactly have much going on in it. It takes a very skilled writer to pull it off. Getting the audience to become invested in the psychology of the main char­acter is difficult. When I watched the movie, it lost my interest a little more than half way into the film. I kept wondering if this was just some kind of exhi­bition show for homo­sex­u­ality and fashion in the sixties.

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According to IMDB, co-writer David Scearce (who is really a lawyer by day) has no expe­rience under his belt. That he says himself that he is “still learning how to write” is very telling. It’s clear to me that while his cine­matic sense combined with Ford’s in order to craft the fantastic set pieces we see in the movie, nobody on that movie knew quiet how to write.

Personally, I think it takes a great deal of skill and talent to be able to adapt a novel into a screenplay. I imagine that it would take someone who is firstly trained in literary writing to under­stand the source material. Then it takes someone who is also a cine­matic thinker. An adap­tation of a novel can only be successful if the screen­writer has both skills. Otherwise, things are lost in trans­lation as they usually are when making the traversal from novel to movie.

Because the film doesn’t deliver as a char­acter study (though Firth’s perfor­mance is undoubtedly as excellent as the clothes he wears), it is nothing more than a moving painting. Yes, there is no doubt that the cine­matog­raphy can be described with words like “beau­tiful”, “stunning”. But a film needs to be more than just appealing to the eye. It seemed to me that A Single Man was more a vehicle to show off Ford’s outstanding sense of fashion and attention to detail; a showcase of what a well-dressed man would look like in the sixties. I felt like there was much more to the book than we were shown in the movie. I imagine that the novel would be a far more satis­factory emotional ride. The movie is akin to a blonde bimbo: very good to look at but not very intel­ligent or engrossing.

If Tom Ford can marry his visual sense with better story­telling, I’m sure he’ll be a great success. But for his debut, he exposes his lack of cine­matic vision and tells us that he is still just a fashion designer.