Product Details

• Actors: Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode, Nicholas Hoult, John Kortajarena
• Directors: Tom Ford
• Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Language: English
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 2.40:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Studio: Sony Pictures
• DVD Release Date: July 6, 2010
• Run Time: 99 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (171 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B002VECLVO
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #14,271 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• Learn more about "A Single Man" on IMDb

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Colin Firth gives the performance of a lifetime in A Single Man, a drama directed and adapted for the screen by fashion designer Tom Ford, who clearly has a deft vision and ability in the world of film as well. A Single Man is based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood, and Ford's--and Firth's--gift is bringing the inner-turmoil world of the novel to believable, and devastating, life on the screen. Firth may be best known as a dashing romantic-comedy hero (Pride and Prejudice, the Bridget Jones films), but in A Single Man he demonstrates nuance and depth that will stay with the viewer long after the film is over. Firth plays George, a gay British professor, living a life of true, if closeted, bliss with his partner, Jim (Matthew Goode), in the straitlaced early '60s. When Jim dies suddenly at the beginning of the film, George wrestles with how to go on without his true love--and with never being able ever to express his grief openly. The film flashes back to scenes of George and Jim and their dogs, scenes awash in warm tones, and then forward to the present, shot in subtle sepia tones that show joy has disappeared from George's life. Yet there are flashes of hope and feeling: one brief scene--showing George's seeing a dog similar to one the couple had owned, and drawing his face close to the dog's for a familiar and comforting scent--lasts but a moment yet resonates that grief and loss are felt the same by everyone, no matter what they have lost. A Single Man's cast also includes Julianne Moore, playing a complex role as George's best friend and long-ago lover--one of the only people on the planet who can know all that George is going through, yet with vast vulnerabilities of her own. Nicholas Hoult plays a student who reaches out to George, saying, "I guess I just thought you looked like you could use a friend." But it's Firth who triumphs in the film, and who drives the complex emotions--all true, all rewarding--that hold A Single Man aloft and give it its impact. A Single Man can hold its own against Brokeback Mountain as a story of love and loss that transcends any single genre. --A.T. Hurley


Stills from A Single Man (Click for larger image)

Product Description

Set in Los Angeles in 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, A Single Man is the story of George Falconer (Firth), a 52-year-old British college professor who is struggling to find meaning to his life after the death of his long time partner, Jim (Goode). George dwells on the past and cannot see his future as we follow him through a single day, where a series of events and encounters, ultimately leads him to decide if there is a meaning to life after Jim. George is consoled by his closest friend Charley (Moore), a 48-year-old beauty who is wrestling with her own questions about the future. A young student of George's, Kenny (Hoult), who is coming to terms with his true nature, stalks George as he feels in him a kindred spirit. A SINGLE MAN is a romantic tale of love interrupted, the isolation that is an inherent part of the human condition, and ultimately the importance of the seemingly smaller moments in life.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 52 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting, lyrical - profoundly human February 19, 2010

By wolfgang731

Format:DVD|Amazon Verified Purchase

This film took me by surprise. Being that this was Tom Ford's directorial debut, I didn't know what sort of expectations, if any, I should have had. That speculation was a profound waste of time. I like a great many movies but I love only a handful and this one falls squarely in the center of the latter category. I found it a profoundly lyrical and human exploration of the weight of loss, of the way we try to continue with a life that is now seemingly foreign because it is so jarringly incomplete; a study in reflective motion - the stranger in the mirror that shadows us. We witness how from the moment he wakes, George struggles to just exist in the most normal sense rather than live in the more extraordinary one. As he states early in the film "You see, my heart has been broken." However, we not only see it, we come to feel it. We are wholly sympathetic to him because, in many ways, he's all of us. Just like his loss, George's pain is universal and through that hole in his soul, we enter and come to know him. Colin Firth's performance is superb; a walking testament to weary resignation and automatic reflex. He operates by rote and instinct, struggling to reach the end of every minute of his day. The clocks in his world move ever so slowly and the monotone tick of the seconds hand reminds him just how much more of the day still looms darkly before him. Firth walks that very tricky tightrope with a character that can very easily become the embodiment of all that is maudlin while simultaneously failing to elicit even an ounce of compassion from the viewer. Caricature is one misstep away but he doesn't come anywhere near that pitfall. George is a sad creature, no doubt, but he's not pathetic; a dignified streak runs prominently through him. To those outside his reality, he's the same George they've always known and he dutifully embraces the charade. As his longtime friend, Charlotte (Charley), Julianne Moore delivers with her customary and unerring brilliance. Donning a first rate English accent and a sense of frustration for her ill-conceived affection for George, she struggles alongside her friend to hold on to a world that is slowly leaving her behind. Nicholas Hoult is a revelation as Kenny Potter, George's student; a young man whose own sense of isolation draws him to George and his detached and well thought out approach to life and human interaction. In him he finds a kindred spirit. As Jim, George's partner of 16 years whom we get to know almost exclusively through flashbacks, Matthew Goode offers an honest portrayal of someone whose capacity to love and be loved forever transfigured those around him. Now let us move onto Tom Ford. Where has this man been hiding all these years? He was born to direct. His unfailing attention to detail, his ability to frame a scene is fluid and innate. People go to film school for years for one third of what obviously comes naturally to him. From the first scene to the last, the film pulsates with a lyrical quality that renders it a true work of art and not just another movie. He has certainly set the bar very high for himself. Directorial debuts such as these, are rare indeed. We're not talking Redford in Ordinary People because for more than 20 years he stood in front of the camera. Ford's screenplay adapted from a source that many considered unfilmable is yet one more achievement. The art direction is another major player in the film and it is spectacular, indeed. Both interiors and exteriors brim with authenticity and impeccable taste. The same is true of the music score by Abel Korzeniowski and Shigeru Umebayashi. Though somewhat minimalist in nature it was far warmer and more melodic with just the right amount of melancholy underpinnings. Why this film wasn't showered with Oscar nominations I'll never understand because it more than deserves them. To say that I loved it, is an understatement. A Single Man is, without question, a true work of art.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A sensitive meditation on loving, living and dying February 16, 2010

By Keris Nine TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Blu-ray

In the run-up to the 2010 Oscars, dominated by well-made but overhyped mainstream Hollywood hopefuls (Up In The Air, Avatar, The Hurt Locker) and Hollywood wannabes (A Prophet), there's one film that lives up to the hype, and then some. Even now though, the press and critics bafflingly seem to be reining-in the enthusiasm, wondering whether A Single Man has any real substance behind fashion-designer-turned-filmmaker Tom Ford's superficial stylizations or whether there is any real depth behind Colin Firth's performance. There most certainly is.

Set in LA in 1962, an aging English professor, finding it impossible to publicly grieve the death of his homosexual partner who has just died in a car crash, sets about arranging for his own suicide. There certainly seems to be little more to the film than George's painful reminiscences of what has been lost mixed with chance encounters in the present day - minor encounters mostly, none of them apparently significant enough to deter him from the direction he is determined to take - but each of the little episodes that make up the film and the manner in which they are filmed, cumulatively add up to a realistic and meaningful consideration of the experience of loving, living and dying.

Tom Ford's direction and visual language - the period detail, the coloration, the emphasis on mood and facial expression over expositional dialogue - would seem to owe much to Wong Kar-wai - an impression enforced by the use of Shigeru Umebayashi on the soundtrack - but the director nonetheless finds in it a personal means to best express the complexity of emotions that the situation gives rise to. Colin Firth is a revelation in this respect, his usual impassive demeanour appropriate for the reserved nature of his character, but there's a brave openness about his performance that we've not seen before that allows George's vulnerability to break through. This may very well be the film of the year - it's certainly one of the most beautiful.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars I rented this for Firth, Moore & Goode. I bought it because of something Tom Ford said that I can't get out of my head July 11, 2010

By Sharon Isch TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:DVD

This is the first film since "I've Loved You So Long" that I went to bed thinking about, woke up thinking about and am still thinking about.

It's a "day in the life" story set in the early '60s about a middle aged English professor who has lost his longtime lover in a car crash, sees nothing in his future and intends this day to be his last. As his otherwise everyday-day goes on, it attains increasing vibrancy as it becomes more and more clear that everything and everyone he sees this day he'll never see again and that only he and we know that.

I rented it because I'm a big fan of Firth, Moore & Goode, all of whom were just superb, as was Nicholas Hoult, the now nearly grown up kid from "About a Boy." But I fell in love with it for Ford's marvelous screen adaptation and direction of this Christopher Isherwood story. It could easily have turned into one of those films I re-rent every couple of years or so, but I'm buying a copy instead, in large measure because of this Tom Ford comment on the "making of" extra: He said "If I can get the audience to leave the theater and think 'Wow! I need to pay more attention to my day, because this is all I get!' then I think the film will have meant something." I've decided that what that means for me is that I need Ford's movie available to snap me back to attention whenever needed. Which I suspect will be far too often.