Musings on 'A Single Man'...

Tom Ford's debut directorial piece is, in parts, heart-breakingly wonderful. The first 20 minutes especially are so taut, so stunning, so beautiful, painful and even funny that it's almost hard to breathe. Of course, credit is due in part to Tom Ford, but an enormous dollop of credit also belongs to Colin Firth: believe the hype, believe the superlatives, believe the reviews, this is a masterful performance and as near-perfect as it is possible for a film portrayal to be. When Firth's character George picks up the phone and is told his lover of 16 years has died, the grief that flickers across his face and the pain that registers in his restrained and almost standoffish voice is an absolute masterclass in understated and naturalistic acting.

Julianne Moore, too, delivers an assured and accomplished performance that throughout walks the thin line between beautiful and grotesque. There's also solid and pitch-perfect support from Matthew Goode, Lee Pace and Ginnifer Goodwin. Where the film falls down, however, is in the turns from some of the other supporting actors. Nicholas Hoult still doesn't seem to have mastered the art of acting. His mouth twitches up into a self-conscious smirk and his face is so strained into an approximation of false 'earnestness' that you're immediately aware that this is not one of George Falconer's students, Kenny Potter. This is Nicholas Hoult doing SERIOUS ACTING. The performance is not helped by his dodgy and almost robotic American accent. But if nothing else, Hoult at least looks better than he ever has done in a film before.

Another terrible performance comes in the form of Spanish supermodel Jon Kortajarena's debut film role. Despite being a young man of unfairly good looks (doubtless the reason he was cast) he inhabits the screen with all the presence of a bad smell, killing the momentum of the film and spoiling the audience's stunning involvement in the perfectly-reconstructed era with his clumsily delivered lines and constantly furrowed brow.

These two off-pitch performances might be inexcusable elsewhere but in a film with such wonderful turns from the rest of the cast, they just about gain our forgiveness. Something slightly less forgiveable is Tom Ford's clumsy insertion of scenes into the film that were not present in the book. Let us explain: we are not opposed to writers creating and inventing new scenes for a film adaptation of a book, we positively encourage it. But the new scenes must fit seamlessly in with the old. In A Single Man they were painfully clear. The aforementioned Spanish model's acting is not helped at all by the scene it takes place in with dialogue written (presumably by screenwriter Tom Ford) so clunky and silly. In another scene between Firth and Moore's characters, Moore exclaims jealously (and this is not in the book either) that she never thought Firth's relationship with his male lover was real or proper by simple virtue of the fact that it was gay.

Firth responds with the line "Is that what you think, after all these years?". Even his acting chops can't save the line, which sounds like it belongs in an episode of Hollyoaks or a student devised drama project, not an award-winning film. Ford has also inserted, and stop reading here if you don't want the plot spoiled for you at all (you have been warned), a storyline that involves Firth's character plotting his suicide. This isn't even hinted at in the book: George Falconer is miserable but far from suicidal. And it comes off as almost clichéd in the film - the idea of a piece of art covering a person's last day before they commit suicide is much overused although right now we can't think of any examples (bad journalism alert) - and although it actually elicits some light relief and laughs (yes, really) it feels unnecessary.

Despite these minor faults however, and they really do feel minor in the context of the film, Tom Ford shows immense promise as a director. Visual flairs and metaphors zip through the film with all the artfulness of an established and seasoned director. His style (which at the moment comes off as a cross between Almodóvar's and Stephen Daldry's - two important and excellent gay film directors) can only improve and start to inhabit its own unique groove and space. And what is most brilliant of all about A Single Man is that it is a classy, brave, intelligent and affecting gay piece of cinema which doesn't resort to cheap soft-porn tricks and is not only based on a book by an actual gay author, but directed by a gay man and inhabited by real gay sensibility.

Unlike Brokeback Mountain, a wonderful film made entirely by straight people and for straight people about a so-called gay experience that very few members of the real gay community have actually experienced, A Single Man is a wonderful film about a gay man's grief over the death of his long-term monogamous lover. For that reason it is important and wonderful and a piece of gay history in the making.