[REVIEW] A Single Man
Sep. 18th, 2012 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI had read A Single Man, the 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood describing the last day in the life of a bereaved middle-aged gay man in southern California, for a now-defunct book club, but I hadn't seen the 2009 film A Single Man (IMDB, Wikipedia) until took the initiative to show it to me on the weekend.
It's a wonderful film: the 85% rating at Rotten Tomatoes and the comments in the 2010 Guardian review are worth it. Tom Ford may well be as good a film producer as a fashion designer, producing a movie that makes wonderful use of colour--hue, saturation--and composition to illustrate the changing moods and too-rare moments of joy in the life of Colin Firth's George Falconer. Once, life was worth living with Jim (Matthew Goode) in it, but now, nine months after Jim's death, George is left only with his grief. More, George's grief goes unrecognized: in a time and place where same-sex love is imagined to be an abomination if it's imagined at all, there's no one George knows who understands the extent of his loss and very few people who wouldn't condemn him for it all. Even George's dear friend Charley (a luminous Julianne Moore) casually downgrades Jim and George's sexual orientation. One Frances Murphy wrote that invisibility was George's experience; too true.
It's a wonderful film: the 85% rating at Rotten Tomatoes and the comments in the 2010 Guardian review are worth it. Tom Ford may well be as good a film producer as a fashion designer, producing a movie that makes wonderful use of colour--hue, saturation--and composition to illustrate the changing moods and too-rare moments of joy in the life of Colin Firth's George Falconer. Once, life was worth living with Jim (Matthew Goode) in it, but now, nine months after Jim's death, George is left only with his grief. More, George's grief goes unrecognized: in a time and place where same-sex love is imagined to be an abomination if it's imagined at all, there's no one George knows who understands the extent of his loss and very few people who wouldn't condemn him for it all. Even George's dear friend Charley (a luminous Julianne Moore) casually downgrades Jim and George's sexual orientation. One Frances Murphy wrote that invisibility was George's experience; too true.
