Stephanie Zacharek’s tribute to the best performance by any actor nominated this season, Colin Firth in A Single Man. Maybe it’s some sort of warped sign of progress that the movie about the sexy grief-stricken gay guy is one of the least controversial hot topics of this year’s Oscar mardi gras parade.
Firth’s George isn’t a flashy mourner. There are no histrionics here, no melodramatic breakdowns. Instead Firth does something much more difficult: He limns the negative space of grief, giving it a distinctive shape and heft. Early in the movie, he learns of the death of his lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), via a telephone call. He’s also informed — with as much kindness as the caller can muster — that he isn’t welcome at the funeral; Jim’s family doesn’t wish to acknowledge him. (The movie, like the book it’s based on, is set in 1962 Southern California.)
As George processes the information, there’s no immediately visible change in his expression; if his eyes show a flicker of sadness, it’s hardly detectable. Firth pulls off one of the most difficult feats for an actor, drawing his character’s feelings to the surface in increments you could measure in microns. That is to say, he shows emotion without expressing it.
Firth’s supple sense of reserve is one of the more delicate aspects of the picture: Even in the early part of the 21st century, when we’ve all come to recognize that it’s OK for a man to cry, there is still something deeply moving about a man who won’t, or can’t. And throughout the movie, Firth builds upon that unwillingness to show emotion, which is itself deeply emotional. It’s not that George wears his sorrow as a badge of traditional manhood; instead, it’s something that’s taken root deep inside him — it’s become a component of his lifeblood, and of his sexuality. When he flirts with one of his young students (Nicholas Hoult), a last-ditch effort to extract some joy out of life, the undertow of his grief pulls him back. But his anguish also seems to give him a sense of belonging to something greater — perhaps more a sense of belonging than a middle-class, middle-aged gay man in early-1960s Southern California, living among neighbors whose identities are locked up in the mom-dad-kids equation, would be likely to feel in everyday life.