How spoiled are we in this country, anyway? Terribly, terribly spoiled, I’d say.
If you’d watched the 2009 movie A Single Man, set in the 1960s in California, starring Colin Firth as a private college Prof who suffers the impact of losing his partner in a car accident, while also conducting research on the Dalai Lama’s use of social media to bring awareness to the plight of the Tibetan people, you might think the same. If you're interested, see the latter at Emily's Kaleidoscopic Cafe .
Grief is real. Personal grief is very, very real. Firth’s character, George, is planning to off himself at the end of a day of meticulously cleaning out his office, ordering his papers on his desk in his Frank Lloyd Wright look-alike home, laying out his designer suit, and rehearsing his final act, a gunshot to the head. It’s as if this character is killing himself because he came face to face with a circumstance he could not control, and not because of grief. I can’t imagine he could really have loved anybody but himself in the first place. How could he possibly find time for it? There’s not a thing out of place, anywhere, in this character’s life.
He does have a redeeming feature. He was committed to the relationship, and he didn’t sexually exploit a student whom he probably could have, nor did he try to fill the void of utter loneliness and despair with a hot young Latino he shared a smoke with outside a liquor store. Who knows? Maybe he thought he was too good for that, anyway.
He has a close bond with a European-born attractive socialite-widow played by Julianne Moore. He spends what he’d planned to be his last evening alive at her home, dining, drinking, dancing. Moore’s character is, according to director Tom Ford’s audio commentary “ahead of the curve” in design, music, and lifestyle, generally, which makes the character equally unlikeable, in my opinion. She has money, she has time, and she is truly decadent. I will say this: Moore’s and Firth’s performances are the only reasons to watch this movie. Their acting stuns, especially in their scenes together.
As I’ve alluded, George doesn’t go through with suicide. No surprise there. Whether he actually transforms himself through the planning, I thought, was also questionable. Overall, the story and the film were so focused on material life, in other words, so shallow, I really couldn’t tell what was feigned and what was not.
I don’t like being reminded how obsessed with ourselves, our possessions, and our own lifestyles we are in this country, and so, I didn’t like this film for that reason. Maybe I would like Christopher Ishwerwood’s novel better.
Maybe it’s not more sophisticated, but more complex. Maybe I just don’t like to think that a college literature professor who lectures his students about discrimination rooted in fear is that oblivious to how the rest of the world lives. Oh, that’s right. The lecture was just another allusion to himself.
