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"Playing an emotionally repressed Englishman doesn&amp;#039;t sound like much of a stretch for Colin Firth (the quintessential Mr Darcy), but for the first time in his career, he fully sustains and builds on that tension from scene one to the final fade-out of A Single Man. The effect is achingly poignant. It seems like a part tailor-made for him by fashion designer-turned-director Tom Ford who also wrote the script based on Christopher Isherwood&amp;#039;s 1964 novel. It&amp;#039;s set just a couple of years before in a washed-out looking Los Angeles where George (Firth) is a professor of literature. He is still on autopilot eight months after the tragic death of his partner (Matthew Goode) and holds himself together from the outside in; dressing himself in expensive suits and keeping a perfectly knotted tie, even when he&amp;#039;s just sitting on the loo. Of course, as a designer, Ford pays attention to these tiniest of details, but more importantly, he allows Firth the space to convey the weight of so much frippery. Every minor part of the day&amp;#039;s routine takes on huge significance because it stops him (even if it&amp;#039;s just for a moment) from thinking about that gun in the drawer... After 16 years of being devoted to one man, George is struggling for reasons to go on. As boozy divorc\u00C3\u00A9e Charley, Julianne Moore represents the closest thing to a friend in George&amp;#039;s life, except that she undermines his feelings of loss by offering herself as the answer to his problems. In one of her drunken stupors, she assures him that his homosexuality is just a &amp;#039;substitute for something else...&amp;#039; Unfortunately for the film, the Charley character feels like a substitute for a real, three-dimensional human being. Instead she&amp;#039;s an archetype who could have staggered off the set of Absolutely Fabulous with her droopy cigarette, sloshing glass of gin and toppling beehive. It&amp;#039;s difficult to see why Moore took the role except that she seems to have fun with it. George&amp;#039;s burgeoning relationship with one of his students, Kenny (the fresh-faced Nicholas Hoult) doesn&amp;#039;t feel entirely credible either. Kenny approaches him after a lecture - apparently for the first time - and immediately engages his teacher in a &amp;#039;deep and meaningful&amp;#039; conversation about being an outsider. It&amp;#039;s the kind of spontaneous t\u00C3\u00AAte-\u00C3\u00A0-t\u00C3\u00AAte that only happens in art-house films where the European sensibility is underlined by the casual sporting of angora sweaters by jaunty young men (as Kenny does here)! The fact that George indulges the boy seems contrary to the way he lives his life; always with his armour on, especially on this day. It mightn&amp;#039;t always work, but Ford deliberately angles for that ethereal vibe. He switches the colour tone to match George&amp;#039;s mood and flashes back to the old days in stark black-and-white. There are also slow, wafting close-ups on eyes that remind him of his dead lover. For the most part there&amp;#039;s a bleached, grainy aesthetic which - with all the &amp;#039;60s costumes and set dressing - brings to mind the footage of JFK&amp;#039;s assassination. It all lends to a mood of dour inevitability, though there is black humour as well; e.g. a scene (not the end) where George obsessively fluffs his pillow to make blowing his brains out more comfortable. It borders on slapstick, but even then, what keeps the film anchored is the growing unease that Firth exudes in quiet, crushing waves. He&amp;#039;s always at his best, single-handed.  &amp;gt; What do you think of the movie? Share your views "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/review/a200224/a-single-man/>