Imperfect, Perhaps, But Haunting

George (Colin Firth) sits on the side of his bed facing a stationary camera. His face, beautiful and motionless at first, begins to dissolve; he trembles, and, finally, tears come.

   He has just learned that Jim, his lover of 15 years, has been killed in a car crash and that he will not be invited to the funeral.

It is 1962; George is homosexual.

For his first film, director Tom Ford — a fashion icon from his years as Gucci’s creative director — has lovingly adapted Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel, “A Single Man.�

Often hailed and taught as the first liberated and literary gay novel in English, the book was Isherwood’s favorite and surely his best.    

Encompassing a single day in the bereaved George’s life, the novel is existential, yet elegiac and deeply moving.

   Isherwood always wrote from observation and personal experience. His “Goodbye to Berlinâ€� stories — including “Sally Bowles,â€� the inspiration for the musical “Cabaretâ€� — were based on real people.

   And one can suppose that “A Single Manâ€� was Isherwood’s reaction to a temporary loss in his own life. In 1953 on Valentine’s Day on a Santa Monica beach, Isherwood, then 48, had met Don Bachardy,  blond, willowy and 16. They would live together until Isherwood’s death 33 years later, but in 1964 they were apart during a trial separation.

   George’s dead lover, Jim (handsome Matthew Goode of the incredibly blue eyes), was younger, too. They had a calming, peaceful relationship. Now in the aftermath of Jim’s death, George moves through his day on autopilot — routine controls but cannot overcome the weight of his loneliness.

   He breakfasts, goes to work at a middling Los Angeles college like the one where Isherwood taught. He questions the value of his life and life itself. He shares his numbness with Charley (wonderful Julianne Moore), a tippling fellow English expat, just as lonely as George and the only other person with whom he can talk honestly about Jim.

  He has a brief, chaste encounter with a male hustler (Jon Kortajarena) and a redeeming, chaste evening with a student (luminous Nicholas Hoult.)

   What makes the book so good is the quality of writing: taut, elegant, often very funny, and with a stunning ending.

   But how do you film what is almost an interior monologue with little action?

   Ford does two things to give the story narrative movement and to reflect George’s shifting moods and encounters during the day — one successful, one not so.

   First, Ford alters his palette with George’s movements. Alone and remembering and brooding silently, George is in a color-drained world of beiges, browns, grays. When he goes out into the city, everything is bathed in a smoggy pink. Only when he meets other people does the screen flood with color.

   This will bother you at first, but once you understand the color rhythms, the film becomes even more beautiful. Second, he introduces a gun, the not so successful thing, even a bit ridiculous in one scene.

   The film is imperfect and often derivative.

   Ford overdoes the art direction: everyone wears perfect clothes, drives wonderful cars, lives in amazing houses. (Just look at the flowering, potted trees in Charley’s glassed-in hall.)

   He quotes too many other directors as a way of setting the film in its milieu, and he makes too-obvious comments. But he captures the essence of the novel and draws (or simply films) an amazing performance from Firth and excellent ones from the remaining cast.

   And he delivers the novel’s stunning ending as written.

   It may well haunt you for a while.

   It did me.