I found Tom Ford's film "A Single Man" disappointing.
It's a beautifully-shot, interesting film based upon a semi-autobiographical story by Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood was a intimate companion of WH Auden, Stephen Spender, and wrote the short stories which later became the basis for the show and movie "Cabaret".
Isherwood’s writing about his early adulthood is notable for his commitment to camera-like honesty, and his relatively open discussion of his own homosexuality -- something almost unheard of at the time. He moved to Germany to the Berlin of the Weimar Republic in search of sexual freedom, which included patronizing numerous young male prostitutes.
I had hoped that the movie would offer some insight into Isherwood's later life. The subject also seen one of interest and importance to me: what happens to aging gay men. Current gay culture is intensely youth-centric and the journey and emotional challenges of older men is important, and relevant to the lives of many people.
It is here that "a single man" offered its first disappointment. Colin Firth makes middle age look like a smart social and fashion move -- in addition to his fine acting, he is physically gorgeous, as is every other man in the movie.
The hardship that Colin Firth's character faces is not aging, but the death of his once-in-a lifetime true love, and Firth struggles with a sense of hopelessness and suicidal impulses in the wake of this loss - and man, does he make suffering look good.
This "perfect" love relationship is portrayed in the film with all the death of a fashion shoot for expensive men's clothing. Is Firth's lover hot? You ‘betcha.
The film's depiction of Firth's flirtation with suicide I also found disappointing. We are to imagine that the sole reason for his suicidal impulses is the loss of his lover. The fact that he puts on his mother's wedding ring and puts his father's service revolver in his mouth, or details that the movie presents without any other form of consideration. Neither does the director appear to make anything of the timing of Firth’s first near-suicide -- he is to kill himself just as he is due for dinner with his long-term fe-male friend androgynously named Charley.
Now, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and I suppose suicide should sometimes be judged in the same terms. This suicide attempt seems replete with psychological meaning -- including the catastrophic impact of his dying in such a manner on Charley, who is eagerly awaiting his visit. The protagonist attends to every detail of his plan death, down to laying out the cufflinks he is to be buried in, but apparently he doesn't think about Charley’s devastation.
This is in fact the way that suicidal people sometimes think (I've known a number of people committed suicide, unfortunately), but it's not the way that a thoughtful writer or director of to think.
I don't know much about Isherwood, but my sense from his early novels is of his mother as a engulfing, destructive figure in his life. His father was career military officer who died in the catastrophic slaughter of World War I, leaving Isherwood no other source of real love in his early life. Did this make him gay? Who cares? But it might just have some relevance to the wedding ring and the revolver.
Firth's character exclaims to Charley that his lost lover "wasn't a substitute for anything" - i.e. homosexual love can be just as real as straight love. That's true - but what about the nearly-executed, annihilating torment he came close to inflicting on Charley? Could she have been a substituted victim, substituted for...hmmmmmm...maybe for the woman whose wedding ring Firth's character puts on as he gets ready to die?
I feel that the creators of a single man abandoned psychological examination, in favor of making a beautiful boy-loves-boy movie in which the trousers were always creased, hair is always tousled just so, and the gin is always cold, and love always lasts forever . It's an appealing fantasy, but seems to me a poor tribute to the kind of honesty that Isherwood represented at his best.