Serious film treatments of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender subject matter are rare. In the tiffany decade there have been a handful of Hollywood or U.S. independent films that have treated queer lives with respect and intelligence: Bill Condons 1998 Gods and Monsters, Kimberly Pierces 1999 Boys Dont Cry, Todd Hayness 2002 Far From Heaven, Mike Nicholss 2003 Angels in America, John Cameron Mitchells 2006 Shortbus, and, of course, Ang Lees 2005 Brokeback Mountain, as well as Gus Van Sants 2008 Milk. While all these films have considerable merits, it is not surprising that Brokeback Mountain and Milk were by far, and continue to be, the most popular with a wide range of queer audiences. They appear at the top of the list of best gay films on the Websites of publications such as Planet Out and The Advocate and are routinely cited as inspiring for LGBT people in these same venues. Maybe the other films listed are too arty or less accessible-or in the case of Angels in America just too long- for easy consumption, but Brokeback Mountain and Milk have come to define a new genre of contemporary queer film: smart, well-done, serious, award-winning, and defining a certain queer moment.
In 2005 Brokeback Mountain spoke to many queer people about the fragile and intense nature of gay relationships during the first frenzied height of the same-sex marriage fight: Massachusetts had just begun marrying same-sex couples, as had Canada, and it looked as if this was the beginning of a strong trend. In 2008, however, just before the release of Milk, the majority of voters in California voted yes to Proposition Eight, which defined marriage in the State as an arrangement only between a man and a woman and overturned the State Supreme Courts decision that samesex marriage was constitutional. Throngs of anti-Prop Eight protestors cited Milk-and its subject, Harvey Milk-as an inspiration for their political protests and future organizing.
Now, Tom Fords A Single Man has taken center screen as the new, smart, serious, tiffany rings-winning gay film this year. Aside from the fact that Brokeback Mountain, Milk, and now A Single Man were all gaythemed holiday releases that centered on the tragic death of gay men-that is certainly material for another essay-they share other very striking similarities. All are intelligent, beautifully produced, far more emotionally complex than the average film, and all are stricken with a fatal dose of easy sentimentality that undermines any real power or political potency they might have possessed. Ive spent some time discussing these earlier films because Fords A Single Man makes most sense, and is best understood, as the third part of this triptych. Based on Christopher Isherwoods brilliant and disturbingly stark 1964 novel, the film charts a day in the life of George Falconer (Colin Firth), a gay British expatriate who works as an English professor at a small Southern California college and is mourning the sudden auto accident death of Jim (Matthew Goode), his lover of sixteen years. His day is mundane- he teaches a class on Huxley, chats with colleagues and neighbors, admires shirtless young men on a tennis court, visits with a close friend Charlotte (Julianne Moore), who still has a crush on him, and flirts with Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), a student who seems to be pursuing him intellectually, if not sexually. The film captures the emotional and psychological shifts of an average day with interior monologues, dramatic interactions, vivid memories, and impressionistic fantasy sequences.
On the surface there is much about Fords film to appreciate. It is literate, wellacted, and has already been nominated or won a host of festival prizes, with Firth and Moore nominated for Golden Globe Awards. But at heart it is marred with the same sentimentality organic to Brokeback Mountain and Milk. All three films pose very serious questions about human nature, relationships, and the politics of negotiating queer sexuality in a hostile heterosexual world, and all three fail to grapple honestly or in very much depth with the issues they raise.
Much of the promotion surrounding A Single Man has focused on Tom Fords career as a world-famous clothing designer. While there is nothing wrong with an artist or artisan shifting career focus-Julian Schnabel moved from painting to filmmaking effortlessly and has directed some great films-Ford has not found a clear, tiffany bracelets, illuminating vision for A Single Man and, as a result, has written and directed a film that continually avoids the hard hitting questions he keeps meaning to answer. In part, this has to do with Fords transforming Isherwoods novel, a serious piece of fictionalreportage on the banality of life in Southern California-not unlike Evelyn Waughs 1948 The Loved One, also written from a satirical, British perspective-into a beautifully, in fact opulently, filmed Hollywoodesque movie. In the novel Isherwood writes of Georges modest house (This is a tightly planned house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough here to feel lonely) and of how he and Jim lived here side-by-side, jostling for space in front of the bathroom mirror and moving plates of food through a too-narrow kitchen doorway, ending the passage with: Jim is dead. Is dead. This house becomes a narrow coffin for George and his memories. Ford does have a wonderful sense of domestic mise-en-scne that echoes Douglas Sirk in its ability to convey mood through color and light, but all too often his presentation of George in the context of his home is antithetical to the larger message of the film. Georges house-designed by Jim-is open and airy with large panels of glass and spacious rooms. Ford, moreover, photographs the house with a eye for design and beauty, with images that look like a layout in Home Decorating Trends, thus negating the overwhelming, and confining, feelings that George is experiencing.
This tendency to the upscale is reflected in Georges wardrobe as well as that of other characters. Isherwoods character is a nebbish, a fuddy-duddy of a professor; he even lectures on F.R. Leavis, who was considered conservative and old fashioned even then- that is his appeal to us as readers and what makes his tragedy both heartbreaking and universal. Fords George is dressed in natty, perfectly-pressed outfits that present him as something of a sport and man-about-town, as he makes his entrance and compliments the secretaries at work on their new hairstyles. So much of what Ford has done here seems to violate the emotional core of Isherwoods novel.
At heart, Isherwoods novel-and Ford follows it to this degree-attempts to chart the boring, psychically deadening minutia of everyday life, showing how it moves us all closer to death. Indeed, the book is an emotional and psychic balancing act, as George bounces pinball-like between Thanatos and Eros, made all the more poignant through Isherwoods spare, dispassionate, often harsh prose. Ford pursues this theme and even gives George a more explicit death wish through active contemplation of suicide, but Ford is never deeply interested in the overwhelming finality of death as Isherwood is. In the novel, bodies-all bodies-bear the weight of continual and constant decay, however incremental. Toward the end of the novel, George blurts out to Kenny, The future-thats where death is. Yet Fords visual esthetic is, in a very real sense, antithetical to this. He has crafted a George- and Firth plays him to the hilt-essentially brimming with life. Sure, he is depressed and grieving over Jims death, but Eduard Graus lush photography and Abel Korzeniowskis haunting music continually signal us that life, even on its way to death, is to be savored and enjoyed.
Fords new vision of this material does take a bright, if heretical-to-the-originalsource, turn when tiffany cufflinks has dinner with his old friend Charlotte, nicknamed Charley (Julianne Moore), also a British national living in California. It is in the scenes with Charley that the film really comes to life, as Firth and Moore pull out all of the emotional stops when they commiserate about their single lives (her husband has left her), joke, cry, and get drunk together. Although her role is small, it is clear that Ford has intended Moores character to anchor the film in an emotional reality for George. While their interplay is intriguing, there is something disquieting about the scene set in her house, where they meet for dinner (most other scenes between them take place over the phone). It is not just that Fords Charley is glamorous in a way that Isherwoods isnt- in the novel she is closer to a slightly broken- down Brenda Blethyn than a Julianne Moore-but her relationship with George fits all too neatly into the Hollywood paradigm of the gay man/best friend-straight woman relationship. Certainly Isherwood hints at this in the novel, but also makes Charley and Georges relationship far more complicated. She and George seem to have a mostly unstated history of disappointments in one another that keep them together as well as apart. Even after George breaks down and sobs in her arms after Jims death-a scene, in flashback, that Ford films very well-Isherwood notes that, the next day, George awakens and thinks, I betrayed you, Jim; I betrayed our life together; I made you into a sob story for a skirt.
It would certainly be a challenge to bring all of the emotional complexity of Isherwoods work-much of which is conveyed by indirect first-person internal monologues- into a coherent screenplay, but, in this instance, Ford has relied on the easily recognizable model of gay man/straight woman to telegraph the relationship. The scene works here because Firth and Moore connect on a primal level of desperate need, yet-not unlike the domestic mise-enscne- it feels visually right, but emotionally wrong. What is missing is the real and deeply felt sense of sexual disappointment that the book conveys. Moores performance hits at this a little-Charley and George had been casual lovers in their youth-but Ford manages to sentimentalize this point. The relationship between the two will feel familiar, and safe, to audiences. It is the serious, high-tone, artsy version of Julia Roberts and Rupert Everett in P. J. Hogans 1997 My Best Friends Wedding or a less melodramatic version of Madonna and Rupert Everetts stormy relationship in John Schlesingers deeply flawed 2000 film, The Next Best Thing. The cultural and emotional complexities of relationships between gay men and straight women are myriad, yet certainly the humorous, easygoing Will and Grace model has dominated fictional narratives. It is not surprising that Ford, who has already set himself the goal of making an upbeat film about deeply disturbing material, has relied on these models rather than on Isherwoods original material.
To his credit Ford does not shy away from the homosexual content in the novel. Isherwoods George is highly sexed-a counterbalance to his ongoing grief-and Ford captures this well. But he also misinterprets or misrepresents Isherwoods ideas here. In the novel George entertains sexual thoughts about Kenny and admires his youth and sex appeal-even as he wishes that Kenny, and all young people, were not so shallow and passive. George even questions whether he is being predatory in his fantasies about and actions toward Kenny who is essentially very heterosexual. One of the psychological and emotional thrills of the novel is that George is sketchy, his sexual urges are vaguely inappropriate-Kenny is his student whose sexual interest in George is relatively unclear. But Fords theme here-so different from Isherwoods-is that Kenny represents sex and life and redemption, a far cry from the novels passive, boring boy.
Ford turns the last quarter of the film into a sexual cat-and-mouse game between George and Kenny as they flirt in a bar, go swimming in the nude, and then go back to Georges home. This is all faithful to the novel, but the difference is that there George is constantly questioning his involvement with his student and understands that, however alluring the idea of sex with Kenny may be, it is nothing more than yet another byway, and probably not a very interesting one, on the road to death. In the film, aside from the fact that Nicholas Hoult is continually photographed-both clothed and nude-like a model, Kenny is actively pursuing George. Everything he utters seems charged with sexual suggestion. He flirts like a contemporary teen in a music video, not a young college kid in 1952. In the novel Kenny refers to George as sir, which feels like an awkward attempt at civility; in the film, in the context of his sexual banter, his use of sir has the feeling of an incipient S/M encounter, a little sexual kink to take Georges mind off of death. While Ford has every right to interpret and change his source material, he needs to do it systematically without pretending fidelity to Isherwoods themes. It is as though Ford himself is too disturbed by the novel-which, with its utter, unblinking look at death is very upsetting-to fully confront its themes and tone in his film. In what feels like a panic response, Ford continually pretties it up, fills it with lush, even romantic, images, and softens the hard edges with a beautiful-boy love interest. Ford does not want to get his hands dirty with death.
Nowhere is this more evident than at the end of the film (Spoiler Alert: readers who have not seen the film should be cautioned to go on no further if wishing not to spoil the films ending). When George-after a buoyant, very sexual flirtation with Kenny- has a sudden heart attack and dies, this moment in the film is shocking, as it is in the novel, but even here Ford opts for the more palatable version. Colin Firth doubles over and falls onto the bed as Ford moves the camera around him with a discreet tone of respect and distance. It is not the pathos of the death of Little Eva but his hovering, respectful camera invites us to feel the sorrow of the scene-and just when George was so close to getting it on with the cute kid. Compare this to the ending of the novel: And if some part of the non-entity we called George has indeed been absent at this moment of terminal shock, away out there on the deep waters, then it will return to find itself homeless. For it can no longer associate with what lies here, unsnoring on the bed. This is now cousin to the garbage in the container on the back porch. Both will have to be carted away and disposed of, before too long. There is little, if anything, redemptive about Isherwoods narrative- just the plain hard facts of life, loneliness, and dying. It is understandable that Ford- or any other number of directors-would want to deemphasize this tone in a film, but still, in a profound way, it is the emotional center of the movie and avoiding it creates an esthetic and emotional disjuncture.
Visually, Ford has taken lessons from a wide range of sources: you can spot the humor of Almodvar, the lush, vivid color arrangements of Todd Haynes, even the mysterious painterly quality of Schnabel. Many of the images are arresting-a full face of an advertisement painted on the side of a building, Charlotte staring at George after he rejects her advances, a recurring image of a nude body suspended in water-but in the end they dont mesh with the ostensibly harsh theme of the film. In some perverse way-and this is what Fords film shares with Brokeback Mountain and Milk-A Single Man wants to be heartwarming in its grief. It wants to reassure us that even death can be comforting, that life has meaning (even as George is musing that it does not) and that, in the end, a beautifully filmed movie, no matter how much it may betray its own theme, will make everything all right.-Michael Bronski
