A Single Man, dir. Tom Ford (2009)
There’s a moment in the film where George (Colin Firth)—an English professor—lectures about a book written by Aldous Huxley. In the hands of another director and another actor, this would have been a misguidedly rousing moment. George talks about fear and love and aging, all the themes that, in another film, would be seized on to convey a heart-warming, trite, and hollow message about homosexuals. In the hands of Tom Ford, though, there’s nothing falsely rousing about this speech. Like the whole film, it perfectly indicates the character at this place in time, without overreaching into a half-heated political statement that would come out stale and, ultimately, cynical. It’s a well-thought move for a film that manages to deftly unite form with content while maintaining its uniquely cinematic potential.
This is due in no small part to Firth’s George, whose self-consciously dramatic voiceovers, perfectly organized life, and consistently brilliant realization by Firth render a character who can stand on his own legs. Unlike depictions of homosexuals in films like Brokeback Mountain, which were eager to exploit their characters’ own strangeness with overused emotional cues, A Single Man makes no fuss over its gay characters, allowing the personages to speak for themselves. Though George’s hyper-organized lifestyle certainly speaks to the personal compartmentalization experienced by many gay people during the 20th century, his choices shine through as an expression of his character and not as heavy-handed, metaphorical afterthought.
More important, though, is the style of A Single Man, which doesn’t simply express its content so much as it is its content. Ford is in territory that is laudably far from generic indulgence. The film visibly varies from grainy and dim to bright, nearly Technicolor glimpses of the world–a world that, since the death of his partner Jim (Matthew Goode), surrounds George distantly. George’s neighbors’ overjoyed children play on their lawn in The Wizard of Oz while he watches from his bathroom, straight out of The Conversation. Variations in film stock have been used recently with frequency—one need look no farther than the work of Quentin Tarantino to see how much and to what little end it has been stylistically enlisted. But here, Ford manages to use a strictly filmic mode to explore George’s own psychology.
In an interview following the premiere of A Single Man in Toronto, Ford expressed how astounded everyone was that his film was more than pretty. A good friend of his told him that he’d always thought of Ford as a very beautiful, finely polished box: resplendent from the outside but frighteningly empty inside. Of course there’s something inside, Ford answered. I’m fond of this anecdote not because it unlocks Ford’s project or explains his life’s work, but rather because it serves as an interesting case study in the debate between form and content. When Ford’s friend assumes there’s nothing in the box, it’s because he hasn’t realized that the box’s beautiful style is precisely its content: the “meaning,” if you like, resides in the box’s aesthetic purity. There’s nowhere else to look for clarity in the face of the artwork; the outside of the box is the inside of the box. Form, Susan Sontag famously contended, is content—and though this may not always be true, it certainly is true of Ford’s A Single Man.