Book-Movie Comparison: A Single Man

And here’s one more post about A Single Man, as long as I still have the book fresh in my memory. This is an instance where I saw the movie prior to reading the book, and even though it takes some major liberties, I do continue to love the film – I love both for what they are, what each brings individually (spoilers for the book and the film, which aren’t always the same thing!)

I’ve mentioned before what I regard as the film’s greatest asset: its use of color to create a visual depiction of George’s depression and grief after the loss of Jim. I love the way most of the film is shot in a washed-out sepia tone, only letting the colors shine fully for 1) flashbacks to George’s life with Jim and 2) the fleeting moments in the present where George makes a brief connection with someone that cuts through the fog of his melancholy. I put it up there with Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Carrion Comfort” as masterfully, genuinely capturing the sheer weariness of depression.

Which pairs masterfully with the opening sequence of the book, in which George wakes and gradually “becomes.” The book’s art is in its words while the film’s strongest poignancy is visual, but both are equally effective at painting a picture of what George is experiencing.

The film is less effective at recreating other aspects of George’s emotions, chiefly his annoyance at society and his anger at homophobia. However, it doesn’t fail to do so. Rather, it doesn’t really try to do so. The movie’s version of George is a different animal, unflappably cool and stiff-upper-lip about 90% of the time, and Colin Firth plays that version to a tee. It makes me ache to see him quietly going about his day, with no one recognizing how heartbroken he is. Part of this, I think, is just an intentional choice on the part of Tom Ford and co., but I imagine part of it is that George doesn’t express nearly as much of his anger and annoyance out loud. It’s all in the narration, his inner thoughts about his neighbors and fellow professors and front steps in San Francisco. It’s always tough to fully bring out a character in an adaptation who, on the page, is so internal. In that way, maybe it’s better that the film veers off and does its own thing, making its own clear choices instead of failing to measure up to the book’s.

While the film doesn’t mix in as much humor as the book does, it still pulls it in in small ways. Firth’s staid delivery makes for a nice deadpan on the mescaline story, and I enjoy the imagined visual of Grant and his family in their fallout shelter while Grant drones on about using different contractors so no one guesses what you’re building (that’s probably the moment in which the film best captures George’s wryer aspect.)

I will say, though, that after I read the book, it did bother me that the movie uses the connective tissue of George planning to commit suicide at the end of the day. I understand the urge to give the day some added weight right at the beginning, because the book is really just “a day in the life” for the most part. But suicide? It makes me sad that the 2009 film hits the “tragic gay” aspect harder than the 1964 novel. In the book, George is grieving and aimless, but he keeps going. This is one day, and he plans to do it again tomorrow. He isn’t building up to killing himself. Even though the film uses the device well and shows us a lot about their version of George through his actions leading up to it, I wish it made different decisions in that area.

A Single Man (1962)

I’ve written before about the film adaptation of this novel, and I know I’ve referenced the novel at different times, but I’ve never done a proper write-up of the novel itself. As much as a book can pull me in so utterly when I’m reading it, I can feel reluctant to write about it if too much time has passed since then. Movies, TV, and theatre stick with me with more immediacy, but with a book, even if I remember in detail what I love about it and how I felt reading it, I get this weird sense of there being a limited window in which it’s fresh enough in my mind to write about it. I’d missed my window on A Single Man and felt unqualified to do justice to a post about it, a situation that obviously had to be remedied. So, I read it again (premise spoilers.)

George is an Englishman working as a professor in California in the early ‘60s. Though he carries himself fairly well – a little sadly, but nothing beyond reason – no one can see how badly he’s broken inside. It’s been some time since the unexpected death of his longtime partner, Jim, and ever since, it’s been a struggle simply to “become George” every morning. The story takes place over a single day in George’s private grief. The plot wanders a little, but that’s all right, because George himself is wandering. We follow him to and from work, on errands, alone, with students, with neighbors, with friends, and into his remembrances.

I’m pretty sure I’ve said before (and if I haven’t, I should have) that Christopher Isherwood’s greatest asset as a writer is his raw humanity. There’s so much about A Single Man that’s exquisite, but most beautiful of all is the visceral intimacy of George’s continued grief. The opening pages, in which he describes the slow process of waking and becoming George, in which he paints a picture of all the faultlines of memories running through the house, remain my absolute favorite part of the book. In them, Isherwood does nothing less than produce a beating human heart and hold out it out in his hands to show it to us. Even though the premise of the book is admittedly “tragic gay,” it doesn’t feel stereotypical when Isherwood tells it, because the emotions are so honest and specific.

I also really like that, as heartbroken as George continues to be, that’s not all he is. He’s our sole window into the story, and as such, we spend a lot of time with him alone with his thoughts, and there’s so much else swirling in there amongst the grief. He’s a little vain about his appearance and finds aging to be more than a little undignified. He’s a British transplant in California, and he has a lot of thoughts about America, from the sunshine to the freeways to the euphemistic “blandness” of speech (warning: some of the latter point can get uncomfortable, such as when, in rolling his eyes over the term “senior citizen,” George reasons that “old” has become as verboten a word as anti-Black and anti-Semitic slurs.) He’s mourning Jim’s loss, but he’s also angry about it, and he rails against how a homophobic society tries to contextualize him.

Again, the plot is very meandering, but I really don’t mind it. We’re so thoroughly in George’s head that it’s enough just to follow him through his day, hearing his thoughts and observing his world through his eyes. The emotional and analytical themes keep everything cohesive, and there are enough threads of continuity to tie the story together.

Warnings

Strong thematic elements, language (including racial slurs,) drinking/smoking, drug references, and sexual references.

Favorite Characters: George (A Single Man)

Oh my goodness gracious, how much do I love George?  This is just a beautifully written character (and, in the movie, stunningly performed,) one of the most poignantly-drawn portraits I’ve seen of someone grieving.  Rich, raw, and so, so real.  Amazing.

It strikes me that we never meet the actual George.  Although there are remembrances of the past, some of which the movie depicts as flashbacks, the George who takes us through the story is eight months on the wrong side of a sudden, life-altering tragedy:  the unexpected death of his partner of sixteen years.  He’s no longer the man he once was.  Instead, he’s an emotionally-battered ghost of himself who “becomes George” every morning, putting on his personality like a disguise so he can drag his shell through another day.  There’s something so exposed about that, the private grief of someone who pretends he’s all right.  In an instant, the lens through which George viewed the world shattered, and now the house he and Jim used to share is a minefield of painful memories strong enough to incapacitate him, but he mildly goes to work, the bank, the gym, the liquor store, and to visit friends, carrying all that heartbreak on his own.

His neighbors don’t even know that Jim is dead.  A few maybe wonder why he’s never returned from the trip he took eight months ago, but no one is really interested enough to pursue it, and George isn’t about to tell them.  Here, you see the ways in which George is a mouthpiece for Christopher Isherwood’s thoughts on homophobia.  It’s not that it’s too painful for George to talk about or that he doesn’t want their pity – it’s that he knows they honestly won’t care.  A generic platitude here and there, but when it comes down to it, they’d think it’s just as well, that maybe now George can find “real” love instead of just thinking he’s found it with a substitute.  They won’t understand George’s grief at the loss of his lover, because they can’t equate George’s relationship with the ones they have.  They view it as something lesser, a pale, deficient imitation of the real thing, and if George’s love wasn’t real, they can’t see his grief as being real, either.

And while, yes, it’s horrifically sad that he’s so alone in this and that he can’t tell the people he passes every day, it’s also a shred of agency for George in the midst of his mourning.  It’s like he won’t let them know the truth about Jim because they don’t deserve it; he won’t let them stain his grief with their apathy.  In this way, it almost serves as a judgment.  I love this side of George.  In his day-to-day life, he’s muted and not quite there, but his mind is so sharp and probing.  While he’s uncompromising in his reproach of a lot of things (from university thinking to freeway construction,) his most penetrating insights are always those concerning the inequality faced by his people.  I like that George doesn’t have to be an activist to have these thoughts.  He’s just an ordinary man who notices overt hostility and microagression alike, and he doesn’t often stand against it, but he also doesn’t just swallow it meekly.  Even if he only denounces it in his head, it takes strength to face the pervasive prejudice ingrained in his society.

I wonder if this fervor is what allows him to hang onto the pieces of himself that scattered when Jim died.  Anger can be just as consuming as grief and, if given free reign, it can do a lot of damage in a life, but George’s indignation is aimed at injustice that seeks to diminish his personhood, and I think it might act as a sort of tether that anchors him in the here and now.  If he stopped getting angry at his second-class-citizen status, I think his anguish would overwhelm him even more than it already is, and I don’t know if he could get out from under it.

A Single Man (2009, R)

 

*Disclaimer: The last time I watched this movie, I exclaimed out loud when I saw the Weinstein Company ‘W’ logo during the opening credits – I hate that that man had a hand in so many great movies. In the case of A Single Man, the Weinstein Company didn’t produce it on the front end, but they did distribute it.*

 

You may infer from the picture, the year, and the rating that today’s post is about the movie and not the Christopher Isherwood novel it’s based on.  The book is exquisite, an absolute melancholic beauty, but the film is tremendous in its own right.  Though I’m sure it helps that I saw it before I read the book, I don’t really mind its deviations from the original story; the film always feels true to the soul of the book even when it changes the details, and it’s a gorgeous piece of evocative cinema.

 

George is an Englishman working as a professor in California in the early ‘60s.  Though he carries himself fairly well – a little sadly, but nothing beyond reason – no one can see how badly he’s broken inside.  It’s been a year since the unexpected death of his longtime partner, Jim, and ever since, it’s been a struggle simply to “become George” every morning.  The film takes place over a single “goddamn day” in George’s private grief, one he’s determined he won’t repeat.  The plot wanders a little (though it has a more specific through-line than the book,) but that’s all right, because George himself is wandering.  We follow him to and from work, on errands, alone, with students, with neighbors, with friends, and into his remembrances.

 

Every time I see this film, I’m floored by its use of color.  Most of the movie is washed-out and sepia-toned.  At first, one might think it’s merely a stylistic choice to suit the time period – after all, the film briefly switches to black-and-white when it steps inside an old photograph – but it’s so much more than that.  The flashbacks to George’s years with Jim are saturated with color, brilliant despite their unremarkable backdrops.  This is odd, since it’s far more typical for flashback sequences to get some sort of distinctive treatment (black-and-white, sepia-toned, fuzzy around the edges, etc.) and for the rest of a movie to be shot “normally,” but this film takes the opposite tactic.

 

That’s because George isn’t living in his present.  His life is the one he used to have, and so he passes like a quiet ghost through a day of browns and grays while his memories are soaked in tangibility and immediacy.  Similarly, there are a few moments in the film where George is pulled out of his thoughts and brought into the present, his head above water for a brief respite, and the color seeps back in for these moments.  A kind word, a soft smile, and just for a minute, George feels a connection again.  The whole device is so fantastic.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more effective screen technique to communicate the feeling of grief and depression. 

 

Colin Firth plays George with such gentle mournfulness, a silent shipwreck of a man hidden behind his stiff upper lip.  I’ll admit that he feels more like a character than Isherwood’s George, who’s so visceral and person-like, but he’s a better fit for the slightly different story the film is telling, and he carries it to perfection.  This was the first time I ever saw Matthew Goode, and he’s effortlessly great as Jim.  Nicholas Hoult (Tony from Skins) does a fine job as one of George’s students, Julianne Moore has a memorable turn as an old friend, and the movie also features Ginnifer Goodwin (Snow White!) and Lee Pace in small roles.

 

Warnings

 

Sexual content (including brief nudity) and strong thematic elements.