I like Colin Firth, who plays the lead character George, and I like the idea of a designer of Tom Ford’s talent trying his hand at directing. I even like this film, although it has a puzzling ending.
George’s lover is killed in a car accident on the way to visit his homophobic family. George only finds out when a cousin calls him a day later, and informs him that the funeral is for family-only. The film has been billed as highlighting the isolation of gays in the early 1960s via this depiction of lonely mourning.
However, as it turns out, George – a college professor – has a close woman friend Charley (played by Julianne Moore) who wants to take care of him and a handsome, blue-eyed young student who seems to have quite the crush on him. One wonders where George’s gay male friends are, especially since in pre-movement times the only reliable social scenes for queers were friendship circles that held dinners and parties in an attempt to build sub-cultural communities.
Firth is a strong actor and he gets to both emote and keep his upper lip stiff in turn, but the mixture of dream and fantasy in a period piece of such impeccable design mutes the impact of his work. The bodies are pretty, the flashbacks to those good times with his lover are strong narrative moments and the whole visual conception is fetching.
As with most films today, I find, a stronger editorial knife would have tightened the film up and kept me from nearly nodding off during one of George’s lengthy exchanges with the young student and his half-baked ideas. The ending is so unlikely that it seems like something a director would introduce who simply wanted to wrap things up. But despite these flaws, I remained engaged throughout and nowadays I don’t ask much more from a mainstream movie.
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