Director: Tom Ford
Full disclosure: I did not know that Matthew Goode was in this movie before I went to see it. The first shot of him, mortified in an ice-ridden death, an outrageously and incongruously beautiful scene, was the first sign of how deeply staged this movie is. A field of white--two corpses, freshly blooded--the overturned car which frames the bottom of the shot (did they crawl out? But he's sprawled almost peacefully...) is covered with a thick layer of snow--yet snow only lightly speckles Goode's clothing and dark, lush hair. It was a magazine shot--free from the mechanics of the real world.
But what more does one expect from Tom Ford?
The plot of the film is based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood, set in 1962, a year Ford brilliantly captures in minutiae: the style of clock on the walls of George's university where he teaches English, the highly coiffed and painted women who totter around in tailored dresses, the architecture, and all the miscellaneous items stocked and assessed by George as he contemplates death. George's long-time lover (Charming, toothy Goode) has died, and he himself lives in limbo, with his only friend Charley (played by Julianne Moore with appropriate disarray) keeping an eye on him. A young student seems to play at double entendres with him; a wannabe model from Spain flirts with him over a cigarette.
These impetuses toward forgetting his lover are calls toward life: the visuals pointedly underlines and reunderlines this motif through flooding the screen with color, and then bleaching it away as George turns back toward self-destruction. After about the first half-hour of this, you get tired.
But you could never get tired of Colin Firth as the title character. So many years playing an idiot (see: Bridget Jones, What a Girl Wants, Mama Mia) has obscured the fact that Colin Firth has gained some mastery over his art. He imbues George with crumbled despair and gentle dignity, in the face of outside aggression from the woman who still has a yen for him and the boys who wish not-so-quietly to seduce him. The low point of the film was all the excruciating scenes between George and his brilliantly-toothed student, played by an awkward and inexpressive Nicholas Hoult, who seems to imagine that merely giving men bedroom eyes will suffice for chemistry. Ford would've served better to have cast that role carefully.
The themes of gay invisibility, rebirth/death, and the ever-imperative presence of materiality weave throughout the film, sometimes deftly (as in the broken sequencial cuts in the beginning), and sometimes heavy-handedly (as in the continual bleeds in and out of color saturation). Yet some of the scenes are brilliantly played, and the movie works. Even the ending, which some have complained to be disappointing, seemed natural to me (ever since that first shot, I'd been anticipating the last one).
Ford's attention to textures, close-ups, and little details serve him well because the material dwells so much on the materiality of human lives. Let's see if he can repeat a similar triumph in the future, knowing that he tailored and adapted Isherwood's novel to suit his needs as a director. At any rate, the film is, if not a classic, then certainly a loving work of art, like a tailored gown of watered silk, made to be felt.
