A Single Man

Let me tell you about the book, if you haven't read it. This tale of a widowed gay professor isn't so much wistful as morbid. Exquisite and wise, but morbid. I mean, pathologically grim. Too hopeless even to be sad. In fact, to me, it read less as a story of loss than as a biologist's report on the failing organism. Zolaesque. Very naturalist. Very un-Isherwood. I loved it.

So when Tom Ford called for a sympathetic, sad actor to play the lead in a wistful story of loss, who would have guessed he was George, the widowed gay professor? In the novel Isherwood painstakingly reveals George in all his clinical imperfection. He's smug, sort of, and a bit of a dirty old man. He has a wicked tongue to match his wicked thoughts, but he seldom uses it, preferring to keep his bitterness, his scavenger's appetite, hidden away with his homosexuality. He's not an unlikeable man, but he's altogether too real to be loved.

With the film adaptation Tom Ford reforms George from his bitchy, fatalistic faith. Converted to a sunnier, smoother chill, Ford's George, played with immaculate, mournful charm by Colin Firth in the single best performance I've seen since Sam Rockwell's Charley Ford in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, looks like a wounded animal, not an empty predator. This new George is more than likeable; he's loveable. His soft-spoken, reluctant grief and broken, spontaneous cheer, his melancholy daily rhythms and rituals, his gentle submissions to memories of past pleasure and happiness: they invite love; they inspire goodwill. Delivered with the total, calm bafflement of the lost, this George moves us to experience the failure of feeling so critical to Isherwood's study as well as the feeling of failure itself, the cracked, desperate panic and smothering sense so central to Ford's revision. The movie, I confess, is lighter and more conventional than the novel, but it's also more poignant and appreciable. Surgical and wry, Isherwood's book cuts deeply into the psychology of loss, leaving a clean scar and inflicting minimal damage. Irony is like that; intelligence is a distance-making device. Ford's adaptation, by contrast, is plainly devastating. It blurs the Isherwood gaze and softens its focus, substituting young boys in blankets for cheaply written notes and sentimental certainties for uncanny, though logical and inevitable, hypotheses. But in no way does it corrupt or abuse its materials. For what it's worth, with all their sanded edges and blunted angles, the film's aching nostalgia and fair stoicism felt truer to me, and more lasting, than the book's cool respectability.

Grief is most difficult and deliberate, and most searing, in the unnoticed acts and images that, arbitrarily, spin us into hypostases of remembrance. We become trapped, captured by the inner economy of profit and loss, where, tortured by counterfactuals, we continuously value and revalue the very things we can never possess. Our lives spiral into solipsisms. Which is why so often grief feels like drowning. With every breath we inhale that formless claustrophobia of desire and regret. Firth's performance alone earns this movie an A. How wonderful, then, that the rest of it stuns as well.