Sad Man

A Single Man tells the story of an early1960’s English professor who has all the answers about George Orwell but none for his real life.  It’s one of those films that proves, if the movies were to be believed, tenure at any lit department would require a certificate from the candidate’s therapist and a shoebox full of liquor receipts.  You see, the professor’s knowledge is confined the classroom—he (always a he) is paralyzed by the existentialism within the pages they teach to their naïve students, dreamers who know nothing of the real world. 

This guy’s name George Falconer—that’s right, Falconer.  He’s been in a longtime relationship with a former student—the bird who stalked his prey, apparently, but was trained to fly back to its master.  The lover died in a car wreck, the parents have no interest in even acknowledging the relationship, and so George has been thrown into an unbreakable depression.  Picking up a year or so later, the film follows the day in George’s life where he seriously contemplates suicide.

How bad is it for George?  Well, when memories of his lover surface, news of the Cuban Missile Crisis emanates from the radio.  You see, fear has caused a Cold War between homosexuals and society.  In fact, America’s persecution of homosexuals results from its neo Roman-ness:  George gets the mail and talks to the neighbor kid:

Jennifer: Would you like to meet Charlton Heston? He’s our scorpion. Every night we throw in something new to him and watch him kill it. Daddy says it’s like a Coliseum. Daddy says he wants to throw you into the Coliseum.
George: No kidding. Why?
Jennifer:  Well, he says you’re light in your loafers. But you’re not even wearing any loafers.

This is not to say, of course, that homosexuals were not persecuted and that this was, and is, not a stain on our culture.  It is.  But a scorpion named Charlton Heston?  Surely the writers in George’s canon at school would have thought this a bit, um, writerly.  Or, considering the state of English language prose this century, perhaps not.

The director, Tom Ford, is a fashion designer who was the creative director at Gucci for ten years; this is his first film.  Ford’s design aesthetic is to take something classical (usually of the Hollywood golden years variety) and infuse it with twenty-first-century-urban sex appeal.  Essentially, Ford challenges the nostalgia for the Cleaver Era by saying, look, there was a lot of sex (of all kinds) going on, no matter what the Hays Code of Hollywood, tastemakers of Madison Avenue, and the politicians in Washington presented as the official story.  And that truth, taste-consumers of the today, is not repulsive or false—it’s beautiful. 

So is his movie—which is part of the problem.  No wonder Nicholas Hoult follows his professor around town all day—Dr. Falconer looks like he’s been fitted by Tom Ford!  There’s no doubt that Tom Ford can dress his actors and frame them properly on an exquisite movie set.  And he may yet become a great director.  The problem is that the overstylization creates the emotional distance of a Coen Brothers movie, but with overwritten melodrama rather than intellectual philosophy.  Ford makes Firth say this line in voiceover, rather than let the actor carry it on his face: “Just get through the goddamned day.  Bit melodramatic, perhaps, but then again, my heart has been broken.  Feel as if I’m drowning, sinking, can’t breathe.”

This is not to say that Ford should have gone for some gritty cinema verite version of mid-century California college life, or that he should have aped Todd Haynes (who also found a early 60’s muse in Julianne Moore) and made a parody of a Douglas Sirk film to express his disgust with the moral hypocrisy of the pre-Vietnam era.  But with the limited time and space of a film, you have to have stronger written material, else the substance gets lost in the style.

In short, “A Single Man” is not Mad Men.  Matthew Werner has also been accused of being too stylized, and no doubt, there’s style abound on the show—down to the workday cocktails.  But Werner has a very clear idea about what all this means (the American Dream of the early 60’s wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be!), and the time and space and writing staff to create fully developed characters and storylines.  Mad Men has as much depth and complexity than the very best of today’s prose. 

So, perhaps it’s folly to invite such a comparison.  But Ford gives us a Jon Hamm voiceover cameo near the beginning of the film to suggest precisely that.  Ford’s movie simply doesn’t have the script to pull it off, and he lacks the storytelling instinct.  Let’s compare.  Mad Men’s style develops the substance:  When Betty redecorates the Draper house, we see that the design choices of each character exemplify their positions in the social milieu, and thus refine our understandings of their relationships to each other.  When George Falconer meets a handsome stranger outside the liquor store, we think, wow, I don’t remember the James Dean look being coupled with rolled up jeans, and why is that image of a woman staring at them from a concrete building?   Tom Ford needs to, and perhaps will, refine his storytelling technique, but until then, enjoy the hosts’ suits on Oscar Sunday.

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