Dargis on Colin Firth

While her review of A Single Man is mostly appreciative, her praise of Colin Firth’s performance is noteworthy:

Mr. Firth’s delicately shaded performance no doubt helped steady Mr. Ford’s nerves. Certainly, the director knows how to exploit his actor’s reserve to terrific effect, as when he sets the camera in front of Mr. Firth’s face in one critical scene and just lets the machine record the tremors of emotion cracking the facade. It’s hard to know if Mr. Ford’s most flamboyant visual flourish, the use of a changeable palette to show shifts in George’s mood — the character’s normally gray face floods with color in the presence of another life force, like Kenny — was born out of a filmmaking conceit or a lack of confidence. Whatever the case, while the color changes are initially distracting, Mr. Firth’s performance soon makes you forget them.