Tom Ford’s feature debut and the film that put Colin Firth on the road to the Oscar. A grieving English professor in 1962 Los Angeles plans the day he intends to be his last.
Colin Firth as George Falconer
| Colin Firth | George Falconer, English professor |
| Julianne Moore | Charley, his closest friend |
| Nicholas Hoult | Kenny Potter, his student |
| Matthew Goode | Jim, his late partner (in flashback) |
| Lee Pace | Grant, Jim’s parents’ surrogate |
| Ginnifer Goodwin | Mrs. Strunk, the neighbor |
George Falconer, a professor of English at a small Los Angeles college, has been mourning his partner Jim for eight months when the film opens. The story unfolds across a single day in November 1962, against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis. George believes he is preparing to end his own life.
Ford had been a fashion designer (Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent) before turning to film. Every frame of A Single Man bears his eye: the saturated yellows of George’s blooming awareness, the desaturated blues of his grief, the immaculate mid-century interiors, the studied compositions. Critics divided over whether the film was too beautiful for its subject; most have come to defend the choice.
Firth had been working steadily for two decades but had never been a Best Actor contender. A Single Man was the role that broke that silence. He won the Volpi Cup at Venice, the BAFTA for Best Actor, and earned his first Academy Award nomination — losing to Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart, but in a year that announced a new phase of his career.
Composer Abel Korzeniowski wrote a score that was sparse, romantic, and almost too lush; the film’s use of Bach’s C-minor Prelude over a moment of George’s grief is among the most-discussed musical decisions in 21st-century cinema.
Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel is short, tightly first-person, and explicitly queer in a year when American literature was largely not. Ford’s adaptation honors the book’s queerness while extending it cinematically — the flashbacks to Jim are Ford’s addition, not Isherwood’s.
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