A Single Man
Director: Tom Ford
Invictus
Director: Clint Eastwood
Edge of Darkness
Director: Martin Campbell
Colin Firth has never shown such gravitas as in A Single Man, adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel by fashion designer turned director Tom Ford. As Los Angeles English professor George Falconer, whose long-time partner Jim (Matthew Goode) has died in a car crash, Firth exudes the pent-up frustration of abandonment and loneliness – emotions he cannot for the most part express to his all-American neighbours and faculty colleagues. While his community is gripped by the Cuban missile crisis – the film is set over one day: November 30 1962 – for George, the bombs have already gone off. He has been wasted away by the impact of the accident, his half-life state depleting so rapidly that he chooses this day to buy bullets for Jim’s old service revolver and commit suicide.
George wakes up in the morning next to a pool of spilt ink. The pen with which he had been gracefully writing his final notes has leaked. He bangs a loaf of frozen bread on the table in helplessness. He drifts into a reverie while teaching an Aldous Huxley novel, then, in answer to a question about Huxley’s perceived anti-Semitism, gives a speech about fear. He knows that, as a gay man in the’60s, he might be seen as scary, but to some of his students he is intriguing.
The drama counts down to the moment George pulls the trigger. He flirts with a Spanish would-be actor outside a grocery store. He goes to the bank to clear out his safe deposit box. He visits his old friend Charley (Julianne Moore), a bitter and frustrated divorcee who remains in LA because she cannot face returning to England in defeat. George and Charley have dinner together. It is a buffet of mutual wounding. Charley belittles George’s relationship with Jim. George says Charley’s ex-husband is not worthy of being missed. Moore’s English accent is impeccable; her desperation palpable – it is a compelling sketch of a performance. The gun scene is surprising, comic even, as is a neat visual joke about preparing for bunker life. The final part of the film takes a different direction.
Ford and cinematographer Eduard Grau adjust the colour to fit the mood – some scenes are monochrome, others are drained of brightness. The film is not a tragedy. There is a sense of emotional completeness, hope and a belief in human connection. I was convinced and thoroughly overwhelmed by this elegant meditation on human relationships.
It is easier for a “rugby-neutral” national to make a film about South Africa’s efforts to win the 1995 Rugby World Cup, played, symbolically, on South African soil, than an Australian, Brit or a Kiwi. So Clint Eastwood was as good a choice as any to commit John Carlin’s account, Playing the Enemy, to celluloid as Invictus, with Morgan Freeman cast as President Nelson Mandela.
Eastwood likes to keep the emphasis of his films clear and simple. In the early 1990s, black South Africans who had voted in Mandela wanted to disband the national team, the Springboks, and replace them with one that had no association with the apartheid regime. In the movie, Mandela alone thinks different. Even though he does not persuade the South African Sports Council, he persists anyway. The team is playing badly. The media are sceptical. Mandela encourages Springboks captain François Pienaar (Matt Damon) to participate in rugby coaching sessions in the townships – it helps that they have one black player, Chester, in the team. Improbably, the country starts to get behind them.
Invictus is a film about the redemptive power of sport – its power to heal wounds by offering a powerful expression of shared ideals. The Springboks play, not just for the whites, but for all 42 million South Africans – or so a line in the Anthony Peckham’s screenplay has it. As Hollywood movies go, Invictus is basically OK, although a little flat. It is propped up by artificial drama rather than the real sort. For the most part, the tension between black and white South Africa is played out among Mandela’s security detail, as former Special Branch men and Mandela’s bodyguards work together. The former accept their new role, but Mandela’s guards are suspicious. If you think white and black guards will hug each other at the point of victory, then be embarrassed for doing so and let’s forgive Eastwood that cliché.
Black-white bonding also takes place in Pienaar’s household, as his maid is invited to the match. There is a well-judged final image of black children playing rugby, still in poverty – the film does not pretend an economic miracle has occurred as a result.
I wish the rugby scenes were more excitingly staged – there are some risible scrums. Freeman’s voice is too deep to achieve an accurate Mandela impression, but he suggests the man and that’s enough. Damon also meets the physical and ambassadorial requirements of his role.
Mel Gibson returns to the cinema screen a changed man. The glint of mischief that typified roles in movies such as Lethal Weapon has gone. During his comeback vehicle, the film adaptation of Troy Kennedy Martin’s acclaimed BBC thriller, Edge of Darkness, I thought I was watching a dead – or at least deadened – movie star walking. Charitably, one could ascribe his glumness, not to the relative commercial failure of his last directorial effort, Apocalypto, but to his role as bereaved Boston police detective Thomas Craven. Craven’s daughter, Emma (Bojana Novakovic), was shot on his doorstep and he recedes into grief. Colleagues tell him he’ll get justice. “It’s a cop thing. One of our own.” Craven does not buy it. He plods his way through a conspiracy familiar to fans of the TV series. There’s nuclear contamination, a cover-up, sinister heavies, a paranoid activist, an amoral politician and a mysterious fixer, Darius Jedburgh (Ray Winstone).
Moody Mel scowls his way through the movie. The body count rises, notably at the climax in the home of a corrupt chief executive of a nuclear weapons manufacturer (Danny Huston). Martin Campbell (who directed the original series) sustains a sense of foreboding mood from the first scene.
Pervading the entire film, though, is a question: why did they bother? The nuclear question is, as far as the Americans are concerned, not a live topic. We are supposed to believe that the government would allow Jihadist bombs to be produced on American soil for the sake of campaign contributions. The dramatic device of Craven talking to his dead daughter, as used so well in the original series, does not really work here.
There are a few startling moments, but one of them typifies what is wrong with the movie. A woman who is assisting Craven with his enquiries is run over. When the driver turns the car round and attempts to ram Craven, Craven shoots and kills him. You think: “Why didn’t the driver just settle for one victim?” I didn’t buy it. Nor did I feel darkness, rather a tinge of disappointment. l
Patrick Mulcahy
