Review: A Single Man
Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, published in 1964, is a major work of twentieth century gay literature, and a challenging book to make a film out of. If Isherwood is today rather less widely recognized than his contemporary Truman Capote – upon whom a brief, mean joke is played at one point in this film – one suspects that director Tom Ford intends with his adaptation of A Single Man to re-establish Isherwood’s place in the popular consciousness, much as Bennett Miller’s Capote did for that author in 2005.
Author Christopher Isherwood
But the popularity Ford wants to claim for his film and his version of Isherwood is, of course, a popularity amongst only the right people – people of feeling (as Colin Firth’s George remarks during the film, “a world without sentiment is not a world I want to live in”), people of intelligence, and most importantly, people of taste. As every review of A Single Man has pointed out, Ford is a well-known fashion designer and first-time film director, and his attention to ‘matters of taste’ - fashion style, costuming and set design – often comes at the expense of the ‘bread and butter’ elements of narrative cinema, like character and plot. Set in Los Angeles in 1962, the film’s lavishly detailed mise-en-scène and soundtrack establish an impeccably tasteful simulacrum of that world, in a manner that bears the influence of such loving reconstitutions of early-sixties style and cool as Wong Kar-wai’s In The Mood For Love and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times.
In The Mood For Love (the composer of whose famous score, Shigeru Umebayashi, contributed some of his trademark, lush music to A Single Man) may be an ostensible cinematic influence upon Ford’s film, but a far more crucial point of reference is TV’s Mad Men. A Single Man simply could not have been made in the way it has been, and certainly could not have been released to the wide acclaim it has received, if Mad Men had not gone before it. It is not simply that Ford uses Mad Men’s team of production designers, and that as a result superficial elements of the sets and costumes immediately recall the world of that show; rather, the most significant thing A Single Man adopts from the show is its rhetorical use of these details of set and costume.
Colin Firth in "A Single Man"
As Brad Nguyen discussed in his recent piece on Mad Men here at ScreenMachine, the lovingly constituted particular elements of the show’s ‘world’ are recurrently rendered as fetish objects; but they also have a rhetorical function, what Roland Barthes called the “reality effect,” wherein the sheer narrative superfluity of a precise detail serves to lull viewers or readers into an uncritical acceptance of the reality or ‘givenness’ of the represented world – and it is this that A Single Man has picked up on. As we follow George, a professor of English in mourning over the recent death of his lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), over the course of one day and night in LA – from his home to the college campus where he teaches, to a bank, to a bar, to the beach – this reality effect functions by impressing upon us the authenticity of the represented world, whose sensory attractiveness (in addition to the costumes and sets, almost all of the supporting actors in the film are preposterously good-looking) is as alluring as its repressive social mores are damnable.
Ford isn’t possessed of much talent as a director, and his maddeningly pedestrian editing and tediously overstated use of lighting changes threaten at times to derail the immaculate lushness his team of production and sound designers have worked so hard to establish. But what is most troubling is Ford’s co-opting of Isherwood’s good name for this tiresome vanity project, which sadly cannot be saved even by a very fine performance from Colin Firth. Seemingly destined to become as overrated as another recent literary adaptation hack-job, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (directed by another non-filmmaker, Julien Schnabel), A Single Man is less a reclamation of a major author than it is a total evacuation of all (enunciative, thematic, narrative, poetic, personal) content from that author’s work, turning his name into another glittery signifier of Ford’s excellent taste – another pink cigarette, another jazzy number played on a period-appropriate turntable, another stylish pair of shoes.
Yosh
27/02/10 - 8:23 PM
It is all a bit tedious, isn’t it? Though Colin Firth is great, and not just great but likable.
Also, I for one didn’t find Nicholas Hoult at all attractive, and found the constant fetishisation of his various body parts a little nauseating.
Conall
28/02/10 - 12:48 AM
Well yeah, I guess really I should have put “good looking” in quotation marks; the actors aren’t necessarily attractive so much as they are ATTRACTIVE, their over-determined ‘good looks’ being incessantly forced upon us (this being true both of the boy and his blonde girlfriend, and also the Spanish street pick-up). I agree about Firth, it’s the most sensitive and affecting performance I’ve seen him in, despite everything else in the film.
jessie
02/03/10 - 10:23 AM
Haven’t seen this yet, but after seeing a great doco about Isherwood’s lover Don Bacchardy recently I was really eager (before all the bad reviews started coming in!).
I get the point about the seductive veneer of Mad Man’s art direction, but have two responses to it-
-surely the characters themselves are as seduced by the trappings of middle class 60s luxury as we, the viewers are? and isn’t that part of the point, especially of the creatures who inhabit the vapid world of advertising described in Mad Men- and the public they are marketing to?
-Mad Men is one of the first major examinations of the 50s/60s era that doesn’t dismiss it out of hand, deride, charicature, react against or overly nostalgise it. (is nostalgise a word?). It takes it seriously on it’s own terms, which is what sets it apart- I think the set design is an important part of that, as it is in any period production: to emphasise the foreign-ness of this world, that is the past (to kind of paraphrase..). I think a single man, despite noted shortcomings, is part of this interest in re-addressing this era in this way.
Something else: at the risk of sounding both pedantic and patronising…Tom Ford didn’t edit this film. Directors so often get unjustly praised or criticised for the work of the editor (notable example: Baz Luhrmann), that I think it’s worth correcting.
Brad Nguyen
06/03/10 - 11:57 AM
I think the point I was making about Mad Men is that it IS nostalgic, but in a new way. It does make a point of addressing the social oppression of an era, only to package it neatly as “history”. The problem I see here is that (1) because history is rendered “foreign”, it loses its ability to speak to the present, loses its “radical potential”; and (2) it reduces the past to aesthetic beauty, something to be admired by people with taste. Sure Mad Men deals with race and gender issues of the 60s and whatever, but what is more important to the audience is that it does it “so tastefully”. The pleasure of rendering the past, rather than saying anything productive about it, is hardly a new way of addressing the era.
You do sound pedantic when you state (albeit correctly) that Tom Ford didn’t edit the film. You are right that the official editor makes the nitty gritty editorial decisions (which is a skill in and of itself) but it is the director who determines the editorial aesthetic, who determines the shots that themselves determine the edit. When Alfred Hitchcock did not have final edit on his films he would shoot very specifically so that the editor of the film did not have any space to make creative decisions. So I would say its pedantic to harp on the “who is responsible for editing” issue. I think its pedantic to say that dizzy MTV-style editing is not a Baz Luhrmann signature. You might as well claim that Godard had nothing to do with the jump cuts of Breathless. Film credits are more of a formal tradition than something that accurately reflects the creative choices of the filmmaking process. This is even more true now in the age of WGAs and DGAs and whatever.
jessie
07/03/10 - 8:13 AM
I just completely disagree with both of you. I made this point because I believe a lot of people misunderstand the role of editing, and nothing you’ve said above contradicts that notion.
Saying “the craft of the editor has certainly been greatly eroded” because of “machines” (do you mean computers?) is, um, weird. For a start- who do you think still edits with actual film?/can afford to shoot a movie on film, do you think? Let alone pay for the facilities and time required to edit it “by hand”? Certainly most smaller, non-mainstream productions can’t. And bemoaning the fact that it has been “divorced from human hands” is such a boring, fuddy-duddy way to think about technology. You should see “Murch” to see how an editor can work with computers, and tell me whether you think the craft has been eroded.
Pacing is absolutely (part of) the job of the editor- in collaboration with the director. But then, it totally depends on who the director is- what their interest in and understanding of editing is. You cannot say absolutely who is responsible for it because that collaboration will vary from film to film, from person to person – as will nearly every role in a production. Most directors are not auteurs, and a film is re-made from the original vision at nearly every step of the process, as the limitations of time, money, light and talent begin to impinge. An editor who is faced with crappy rushes, and a story board that does not translate to film, will have to try to cobble together an alternate sequence to find meaning.
The roles of editor and director you describe and ascribe to, could only exist in a vacuum- in an idealised, perfectly hierarchical vision of film-making.
See this short piece for some interesting reflections on the process: http://www.webdelsol.com/SolPix/sp-murch.htm
Also, there are some great spotlights on editors in screenworlds.
Re: Mad Men. My original point was that instead of taking a “revisionist” approach to the 50s and 60s- as so many others have- it allows no concession to contemporary social mores. This is an era before the civil rights and sexual revolutions had filtered down into individual lives. There is plenty of implied critique in Mad Men of how bigoted and consumerist people were, but it doesn’t pretend that Peggy or Betty are some kind of pioneering feminists, doesn’t pin politics on people who in reality would’ve been only dimly aware of them.
I think Mad Men is good melodrama. It’s not Sirk, but in the tradition of. I don’t know that it’s claimed to be more than that, and for me-a fabulous looking, meaty, immaculately written and performed melodrama is more than enough.
Brad Nguyen
07/03/10 - 4:45 PM
Jessie, I don’t think there is a misunderstanding about what editors do here. Obviously editing a film is an art form. For example, in a simple conversation scene, much of the success of the scene depends on the skill of the editor. So in a close film analysis, it would be appropriate to talk about the editor’s choices. But there are many ways in which an editor does not have control over the way shots are assembled in a film, especially when we are talking about “aesthetic”. There is just no way that Jill Bilcock could decide that the musical numbers in Moulin Rouge should really be edited with long 5 second takes (as amazingly talented as she is). Its frenetic aesthetic is a creative choice of Baz Luhrmann. So in the sense that Conall talks about the editing of A Single Man (i.e. the way shots flow into one another), I think its appropriate to talk about it as a function of Tom Ford’s creativity, the way he has conceived shots etc.
You are totally right that film is a collaborative process so complex that assigning credit to anyone in a review such as this will always be problematic. But Conall is clearly talking about the editing in this film to the extent that it reflects the director’s vision. And it is certainly not at all a “statement of fact” that Tom Ford is not responsible for the editorial aesthetic of A Single Man.
Now with Mad Men:
I don’t think it is particularly radical to address the social injustices of the 60s and I never made that claim. The “radical potential” I’m talking about is in subverting the way we relate to history. If we are to think of history in terms of “foreignness” and “pastness” than you are already rendering history mute, as mere bites of information to be consumed and expelled. This is the approach to history that Mad Men takes.
I don’t think its “legitimate” to revel in the aesthetics of the era because the show is about advertising. No more than it is legitimate to revel in the pleasure of violence because a film is about war. Not that I’m taking a stance against violence in film or visual pleasure. But to “revel in the aesthetics of advertising” is already ideological, and its affect should be critiqued.
I think it is naive to think that Mad Men “allows no concession to contemporary social mores.” This well-balanced article on Mad Men makes a good case for why that is so.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/11/mad-about-i-mad-men-i/7709/
And this is pedantic of me, but I don’t think its really accurate either to call Mad Men a “melodrama”. Film melodrama denotes the use of artifice, the use of exterior affects (colour, design, music) to determine interiority. Its a poetic use of filmic conventions. Mad Men by contrast is obsessively concerned with period accuracy. Part of the appeal of Mad Men is the idea that what you are watching is historically exact, that it is sophisticated. This is a whole different ballpark to the aesthetics of melodrama. I said this might be pedantic, but I think the distinction is important in understanding my analysis towards Mad Men.
Lastly, I do think it is interesting to look at the fact that “some viewers are superficial”. This is because the real value of art comes in the way it is received. That the net value of Mad Men culturally is that people bought a few more suits DOES reflect on Mad Men as a text, i.e. its obsession with sets and costumes and whatever. The reception of a film is a telling way to see how a text operates, what kind of desires it engenders in its audience.
jessie
07/03/10 - 10:45 PM
No, I really think there is.
Baz Lurhmann may have had an idea of “what he wanted” but he would have had several cameras covering the dance scenes, with a range of different shot lengths to give maximum options to the editor in the final cut. He probably didn’t draw the story boards himself- that “act” being more in Catherine Martin’s team’s purview. Even the script writing was shared with someone else- which itself defines so much of a film before the director ever gets their hands on it.
I know what Conall meant, and I know he knows the difference. It was a semantic point to which you have both gloriously over reacted.
Re: Mad Men. I take your point about history. Your “film theory 101″ text book definition of Melodrama is limited. BUT I cease and desist. You officially have the last word on Mad Men Criticism. Pat yourself on the back, counsellor.
Eugenia
12/03/10 - 10:39 AM
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was certainly not a literary hack-job. Schnabel may be a painter, but this only added to the complexity and layering of this film. I found it exquisite and painful and beautiful – not a work by just some old ‘non-filmmaker’ but a unique rendering of a very difficult story.
jessie
06/03/10 - 12:55 PM
Hmm…but is it really “radical” anymore to address the social injustices of the 60s?
I don’t think the fact that some viewers are superficial is an adequate criticism of Mad Men.
I also think it’s legitimate to revel in the aesthetics of the era given the show is about advertising.
Ha. You really got a bee in your bonnet about the editor comment! Wasn’t meant to be inflammatory- just a statement of fact- you can blame Tom Ford for the crappy editing, but he didn’t do it himself. I think it’s an important distinction- don’t care if you think I’m harping on! An editor is not just a trained monkey- they are a collaborative partner, whose influence (creative and technical) on the outcome of a film is vital.
Conall
07/03/10 - 2:45 AM
Sorry for not getting back to these comments sooner, been an impossible week.
I think it is entirely appropriate to talk about “Tom Ford’s editing” in a way that it would not be appropriate to talk about “Tom Ford’s cinematography” or “Tom Ford’s score” or “Tom Ford’s acting,” because we are not talking about a pre-existing material which the director then moulds into a part of his ‘creation’ – editing is not a ‘thing’ in the way that the footage shot by a cinematographer or the performance of an actor or the words of a writer are, but a process of work, an act. Obviously the person credited as editor on the film is centrally involved in this process, but when it comes to the aspects of editing that I am concerned with in my review – the establishment of pace and rhythm across a beat, a scene, a sequence and across the entire film – the director (in the context of the division of labor common to contemporary mainstream cinema) bears the responsibility. I doubt that if I had written of “Tom Ford’s pacing” you would have been concerned, yet the two statements are effectively synonymous; in speaking of editing I speak of the process of labor (the labor of any number of individuals, but chiefly of “the editor”) through which this pace is established, but that “through which,” that transformation, is the director’s work, the director’s act. There are other, more technically specific ways of talking about editing that would necessarily require discussing the work of the editor herself as distinct from that of the director – though on contemporary mainstream films where the physical labor of editing film material is completely divorced from human hands and even from manually-operated machines, the craft of the editor has certainly been greatly eroded – but I think it is quite clear that these are not the aspects of editing that a review of this kind is concerned with. Editing, in the sense of deciding how each moment of a film will flow into the next, is a director’s job, and so I see no problem with talking about “Tom Ford’s editing” even though he may not be listed as “Editor” in the film’s credits.
I find Mad Men extremely boring, and have not seen very much of it, so there is not a great deal I can say about the specific content of the show. In any case, I am very dubious of this idea that the role of set design on “any period production [is] to emphasise the foreign-ness of this world, that [it] is the past.” Clearly enough this is true of Mad Men, and of A Single Man, just as it is true of most adaptations you will see of Victorian novels, or medieval epics made by John Boorman or Ridley Scott. The question is, what is at stake in emphasizing pastness and foreignness, in overdetermining everything that is alien? There is nothing innocent or purely mimetic about such work, nor is there any self-evident way of achieving pastness in period films, because any supposition we make about the past, no matter how well-researched and “authentic,” is intimately bound up in our contemporary concerns, our idea of ourselves and how we see ourselves in relation to history; and if you look at any of the great, revolutionary period films by Eric Rohmer, Manoel de Oliveira and others, you can see just how radically the received conventions of how to do “oldness” in cinema can be exploded, and how much more can be achieved once these conventions are dispensed with.