A single man movie review

Christopher Isherwood was one of the great prose writers of the 20th century, a man of complexity, honesty and wit, and the fashion designer Tom Ford, making his carefully stylised directorial debut, has done an altogether admirable job of bringing to the screen what many regard as his best novel.Born in 1904, Isherwood grew up with the cinema, was fascinated by the relationship between literature and the new medium, and his most famous line occurs his most celebrated book, ­Goodbye to Berlin: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." Over the years he worked frequently on movies (his masterly novella, Prater Violet, was based on his experience of co-writing the 1934 Berthold Viertel film Little Friend), and when he and WH Auden left Britain just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Auden settled into the literary world of New York while Isherwood travelled west to be close to Hollywood and to California-based students of ­eastern religions.

Isherwood touched on Hollywood in The World in the Evening, his first novel set in America, and satirised it in the adaptation of Waugh's The Loved One that he made with Terry Southern, which he spoke of as his most enjoyable experience in the cinema. He can be spotted as a party guest in his friend George Cukor's final film, Rich and Famous (1981). A ­Single Man, however, published in 1964, while as semi-autobiographical as the rest of his fiction, has no reference to Hollywood. Its background is a very specific time in America: the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 when the nation seemed on the brink of annihilation, but before the escalation in Vietnam and the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s. And its setting is that rootless, lotus-eating southern California, where conformity and eccentricity painfully coexist and where anything seems possible. Several generations of British homosexuals, from the film director James Whale in the 1930s through Isherwood in the 40s, to the screenwriter Gavin Lambert and the painter David Hockney (both close friends of Isherwood) in the 50s and 60s, found a liberating freedom there.

The central character is the openly gay George Falconer, a 58-year-old British exile and professor of literature at a middling Los Angeles university, living a few minutes from the beach since 1938. He's played by Colin Firth with an unforgettable intensity. Observing the world through horn-rimmed spectacles in an apparently detached, ironic, quizzical manner, he's a camera with its shutter open and appears as coldly fastidious and un-Californian as his immaculate suit, white shirt and tie. But George, like Isherwood at that time, is concealing an inner turmoil. Isherwood was worried about losing his young partner, the American painter Don Bachardy and thinking of a move back to England or to the more relaxed San Francisco. George is in a state of anguish over the recent death in a car crash of Jim (Matthew Goode), his lover of 13 years, whose family ignored George's existence. He also finds increasingly infuriating both the homophobia of the political right and the bland understanding of middle-class liberals, and regards his time as a teacher wasted on a new generation of shallow students.

The action takes place in a single day, Isherwood arriving at this day-in-the-life form after re-reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, which was in turn inspired by James Joyce's Ulysses. Of the films based on these novels, Ford's is, I think, the best, though Isherwood's often savage social criticism – of university life, the straight world and cultural homogenisation – has been considerably softened up. A central theme is ageing and mortality, the inevitability of one's own death and that of those you love.

When the book appeared in 1964 the novelist and critic Stanley Kauffmann noted in his perceptive review striking resemblances between A Single Man and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, and he even suggested it might well have been called "Death in Venice, Cal". This dramatic thrust has been further emphasised by Ford and his screenwriter David Scearce, borrowing, consciously or unconsciously, from a French movie dating from around the same time as Isherwood's novel, Le Feu Follet, where the protagonist, at odds with a distrusted world, carries with him everywhere a Luger, with which he proposes to commit suicide. Likewise, George has a gleaming black revolver that he similarly fetishises, buys bullets for and thinks of using.

While engaging in reveries and flashbacks, George goes about his business as a teacher, conducting a class on Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and challenging his students to think about conformity and prejudice. He has two particularly remarkable encounters, one with an old friend, the other with a young student. The old friend is Charley (the excellent Julianne Moore), an English divorcee considering returning to London, with whom he has an extended, boozy dinner. The student is a sensitive outsider, the insecure bisexual Kenny (Nicholas Hoult). Both penetrate George's carapace, bringing out a frankness and vulnerability he's tried to ­conceal.

Exposed to searching close-ups throughout, Colin Firth gives the performance of his career as George, and subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, gradations of colour and visual texture reflect and complement his changing moods as the day goes on. This is a self-conscious, superbly crafted, deeply felt movie. It's not a gay film but the story of a gay man, a single man in several senses, but also everyman in the way we respond to him, as we do to Clarissa Dalloway or Leopold Bloom.