Film review: Single Man

Christopher Isherwood is perhaps most known for his The Berlin Stories, featuring Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). He took his cultured sharp eye to that most extraordinary of capitals and wrote himself into the annals of political literature. Goodbye to Berlin became the working material for Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972), featuring a somewhat miscast Liza Minnelli as the hyper-individual Sally Bowles.

With A Single Man (1964), Isherwood moves into more personal territory. Himself a gay artist who traveled to the United States with his friend of many years, the poet W.H. Auden, Isherwood gives us George, (played smoothly and melancholically by Colin Firth), a middle-aged academic from a state university in Los Angeles. George is grieving. He has lost Jim in a car accident. He contemplates suicide. But grief within the closeted existence, amongst the invisible members of society, is not acknowledged.

A Single Man was seen as the furious shot across the bows for gay literature. It does not merely peer into the lives of these lovers, but the politics of the age. The cloud of nuclear extinction menaces the participants. The Soviets have put nuclear missiles into Cuba to safeguard Fidel Castro’s fledgling regime, and there is a near fatal standoff between Moscow and Washington. At the precipice of human life, intensity becomes even more acute. Human frailties, strengths, and desires are drawn together, strained through what seems like a sieve of life experiences. We are left with an intense concentrate of human material. The relationships with between George and his student Kenny (Nicholas Hoult) and long-time friend and unsatisfied lover Charley (Julianne Moore), are luxuriously rendered by Eduard Grau’s cinematography.

The audience might revel in the toned bodies and the aqueous allusions. Some will be irritated by the lingering sequences of self-indulgent suffering, tributes to death and bereavement, but the artistry of this piece should not be doubted. Tom Ford, former creative director of Gucci, relishes this directorial chance, larding us with scenes of idealized lost love, scenes which do drip with a sadness that is, in every sense of the word, egotistical. Jim (Matthew Goode) surfaces through the film constantly – the first meeting, the last. Whatever critics might make of this directorial debut, it is beautiful.

The ego struck, wounded and bleeding, is what matters here. Ford almost does too well to bring that out, a feature that results in replicating the book’s final moments in his film. This angered Ty Burr of The Boston Globe (Dec 25), who felt that such a sharp ending was ‘a grossly unfair one’, a ‘betrayal’ of the audience. (Burr had evidently forgotten about George.) Despite themes of persistent poignancy, one is never left to commune entirely with George’s grief. His grief is his alone, so heavy in weight it asphyxiates, seals, and drowns. George is, in effect, drowning in invisibility. How the experience is gathered from the storm is what matters, and Isherwood managed to give us a snippet of that quest.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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