REVIEW: Colin Firth's bottom looks beautiful by moonlight

Colin Firth fans are a patient lot, by and large, willing to bide their time without complaint while they wait for a new movie starring their man. They will be amply rewarded by A Single Man, which is the Colin Firth movie to end all Colin Firth movies. God but he's good in this film. He's in fantastic shape, tan, his hair thick and lustruous, his suits beautifully tailored, his bum beautiful in the moonlight. (Now there's a sentence I never thought I'd write.) He plays George Falconer, an English college professor working in California in the early sixties; by day he wears professorial spectacles and gives lectures on Kafka; by night, unable to get over the death of his lover (Matthew Goode), he calmly contemplates suicide. That's the film, which covers just one day in his life, maybe his last. Firth gets one knockout scene right at the beginning of the film — a mixture of crisp manners and silent agony — although I never quite bought that he was on the brink of killing himself. Firth can't help himself, I guess: he's such a genial actor, twinkling with everyone he comes across. When we get there, the scene is played for laughs, with George unable to get the combination of pillow, bed and gun to his exact liking. It would be funnier if the entire movie weren't like that: there's not a hair out of place in the whole thing. I get what Ford is trying to do: lay out this guy's last day as neatly as he lays out his shirts on the bed, American-Gigolo fashion. But his direction is so meticulously perfect that it's hard to tell where pathology ends and art direction begins: everything in this movie is laid out just so, every frame a masterclass in composition. One of the flashbacks is in black and white, for no discernible reason, like the slo-mo that comes out of nowhere to assail Firth at random moments: driving to work, visiting the bank. And while Firth talks movingly about the plight of invisible minorities, the gay student he almost spends the night with is rather too flagrently out (angora sweater, lipstick). Really? In 1962? At times like this you wonder whether Ford's commitment to period goes far beyond an intense interest in great jacket lapels. I longed for some mess: real mess, not the art-directed throw-cushion kind. Firth cracks open — his director clams up.

A Single Man (2009)
Directed by Tom Ford
W. Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode
Written by Tom Ford & David Scearce
From a novel by Christopher Isherwood