The singularity of Colin Firth

I missed A Single Man during the Toronto Film Festival and missed it again when it first opened theatrically. I was wary of it, noting review headlines that often insinuated the too-easy yet suspiciously accurate-sounding attacks on fashion designer-turned-filmmaker Tom Ford’s excessively fussed-over, largely superficial direction. What made me keep wanting to see it was, of course, Colin Firth. Is there another leading actor so consistently pleasurable and moving to watch who makes so many mediocre movies? Would A Single Man be the one to showcase his tremendous blend of talent and pure screen presence? It has, in any event, won him an Oscar nomination.


Having finally caught up with A Single Man—the depiction of a day in the life of Firth’s Anglo-American English professor George, mourning the loss of his lover, set in November of 1962, and based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood—I was surprised to find the movie to be actually less glossy or formally rigorous or provocative that I’d intuited. Or hoped. It is an oddly cool movie for one so steeped in grief. There are loudly announced stylistic choices to be sure, but many of them fall short of their intended impact. Ford’s jump-cuts are annoying, and his jarring switching of angles within a scene is superfluous, often disguising stasis. His cutty yet ceremonialized flashbacks to moments shared by George and his conspicuously younger boyfriend convey little in the way of emotional weight. His combination of slow-motion and the shifting of the image from dull tones to saturated colour is employed frequently, which does help us to trace the many moment’s in George’s day when he briefly recognizes hints of beauty in an otherwise drab, Cold War era and now largely loveless world, but it also renders the technique a gimmick whose meaning is very limited. Besides, if George can so often be reminded of life’s value, even a purely aesthetic one, does his depression not begin to feel too close to mere self-pity?


Firth, unsurprisingly, looks very compelling. In fact, as unlikely as this might seem, with his lovely haircut, large framed glasses, and elegant suits, he closely resembles Marcello Mastroianni from roughly the same period in which A Single Man is set. (Julianne Moore, who plays George’s one close friend, by contrast seems modeled after Dusty Springfield.) Firth has absorbed his costume fully, letting it alter his posture and expressions. Ford’s careful attention to George’s personal appearance and accoutrements is commendable. It only seems problematic when it begins to seem like a replacement for characterization.


“I am exactly what I appear to be. If only you look closely.” This is George’s most memorable line, and says an awful lot about Firth too, whose best moments may be the ones where George, as a way of making peace with the world before leaving it—he’s planning to kill himself before the day is through—makes a point of saying something nice to women. In one such beautifully played moment, while complimenting a secretary’s hair, he almost looks like he’s in a trance. Firth has always had great success with a less-is-more approach to his craft. His eyes especially are exceptionally expressive, and his awareness of this allows him to make bold choices with regards to how much he lets his visage colour a moment. But A Single Man simply lacks colour, even during those moments when the whole world seems to blush for George, and Firth’s careful modulation and discretion, while still the best approach given the circumstances, can’t flush out what simply isn’t there to be had. George has some sort of revelation before the movie is through, though it barely registers on screen.


I’m thrilled that Firth is getting more attention as an actor, though I hope audiences less familiar with his work don’t get the false impression that A Single Man is its apotheosis. How much more alive, dynamic, charming, and emotionally vivid Firth has been in movies more obviously awkward or even tacky than this one. In some cases, more risky too. I'm thinking of one of Bridget Jones' Diary, and one of the all-time great comic punch-ups. I’m thinking of recent movies like Helen Hunt’s Then She Found Me, where Firth played a single dad who was wildly neurotic, tactless, exhausted, and totally irresistible, or When Did You Last See Your Father?, where he played a middle-aged man seething with childish anger toward his dying pup. Hell, even in fairly awful or silly movies like the new Dorian Gray or The Last Legion or Where the Truth Lies or Easy Virtue… I could go on. The point is he’s a wonderful actor, and should he win an Oscar for A Single Man (which isn’t very likely, I suppose) then so be it. Just don’t let the movie’s undigested gloom let you think this guy can’t do so much more.

Soul Power: the other rumble in the jungle

The concert was held in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Congo) back in 1974. It was intended to coincide with the heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle” that eventually found its way onto the big screen in Leon Gast’s superb 1996 documentary When We Were Kings. Foreman was injured and the fight was delayed, but the concert went ahead anyway. If you share something of my personal musical inclinations—shit, if you share an interest in great popular music at all—you were probably watching Kings and thinking to yourself how all this Ali and Foreman footage and all this commentary from Norman Mailer and Spike Lee is totally awesome and everything, but where the hell is James Brown, y’all? Jeffrey Levy-Hinte must have been thinking the same thing. He found the footage of that concert and the build-up to it and assembled some dazzling fragments into a parade of musical bliss called Soul Power.

B.B. King

Miriam Makeba

The line-up was conceived, as a celebration of both African and African-American music—and it should be stressed that when we say African-American we’re referring to the Americas, not just to our immediate neighbours to the south. So Miriam Makeba works the same stage as Celia Cruz and the Fania All-Stars. Manu Dibango sweats it out before the same ecstatic crowd as B.B. King and Bill Withers. And did I mention James Brown? Sure, the integrity of the event’s mandate toward unity within the African diaspora may be somewhat tainted by its having been financed under the auspices of Liberian investors and Zaire’s totalitarian, kleptocratic dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, or by the less-than-honourable interests of money-gobbling fight promoter Don King, but the integrity of the music itself is beyond question. Its overwhelming energy, combined with not uncomplicated messages of personal and political empowerment, its genre-dissolving funk soup and soulful primacy that transcends the disparate lifestyles of those in both the affluent and third world, collude to form a resounding statement about the state of global culture in the mid-70s, which remains a watershed moment in popular music and black power. Compressed as it necessarily is, Soul Power has a few issues to nitpick over, but none of them have to do with the excitement generated by the musical performances.

Ali, Bill Withers, Don King

Celia Cruz shakes on a plane

Some fascinating early scenes convey a sense of just how difficult it is to organize an event of this magnitude in a developing country, yet the party starts before the musicians even arrive. A terrific sequence finds a bunch of them jamming on the plane during the flight over, with Cruz making a groove just by knocking a plastic cup on the upper luggage rack. Another sequence showcases the excellent local bands setting up their equipment on Kinshasa downtown corners for the best street performances you’ve never seen. Ali turns up a lot, of course, hugging Brown on the tarmac, dumping buckets of sugar into his coffee, and riffing gloriously and vainly on notions of homecoming, cultural repression and personal freedom for the cameras, while Don King makes a grand appearance wearing his electro-shocked ’fro and one ugly motherfucking jacket. There’s a lot of talk about the meaning of the event and the importance of development and financial reform by numerous spokesmen, though it finally Brown cuts to the chase with wry comments like “You can’t get liberated broke.”

Cruz with Fania All Stars band leader Johnny Pacheco

Brown and the JBs

Brown’s climatic performance, so athletic and frenetic, with that big-ass fuzzy moustache and jumpsuit with an acronym for Godfather of Soul etched across the sexiest male potbelly in showbiz history, with an electrifying JBs—featuring ace saxophonist Maceo Parker—backing him up, is magnificent, and ‘Cold Sweat’ a major highlight of the film. Yet the acts leading up to his appearance are often just as sublime. Bill Withers’ supplies a moving, stripped-down rendition of ‘Hope She’ll Be Happier.’ Makeba, sporting a weirdly elegant fauxhawk, performs ‘The Click Song.’ And there’s something positively cruel about our only song from Cruz being a knockout ‘Quimbara’ (as though Cruz knew any other way to do it). To really give a more penetrating sense of just how diverse and dynamic those three days of music really were, Soul Power simply needs a lot more soul music, more than its 93 minute running time can handle. So I’m crossing my fingers in the hopes that Mongrel will cough up a DVD with lots and lots of extra performances. (Hint, hint.) In the meantime, you don’t want to miss any chance you might have at enjoying Soul Power on the big screen, however truncated its musical bits may be.

The Walken mind: Brainstorm on DVD

Christopher Walken’s brain got worked over an awful lot in the late 70s and early 80s. He was the guy from the industrial heartland who became severely traumatized as a prisoner-of-war, wound up a sort of gladiator in high stakes Russian roulette in Saigon, and won an Oscar for it. He later survived a car crash, woke from a coma after several years to find his girl had moved on, developed telepathic abilities that seemed to be draining his spirit, inching him closer to death with every use, and helped to fuse the seemingly irreconcilable sensibilities of Stephen King and David Cronenberg. It would not be long before he became an alien abductee.

What made that brain so captivating when in peril? His head did seem to weigh a lot, an effect accentuated by hair that, as years passed, seemed to want to leap off his head. The head, and those pale eyes, made him always appear off-balance, and vulnerable. He went by names as familiar as Nick, Mike and Johnny, yet he never quite registered as a recognizably normal person—admittedly, not an unusual trait amongst the new stars back then. Yet, whether breaking down or lashing out, Walken could convey a woundedness that, as with his flights of nervous charisma, could catch you off guard and become tremendously moving.

In Brainstorm (1983), newly available on DVD, he was again breaking barriers of mental communication, again testing comfortable proximities to death. But in this case he was eager to do it, in the name of science and glory. He was Dr. Michael Brace, a hyperactive, maverick scientific genius of the post-hippie variety, like William Hurt in Altered States (80). And Brainstorm was a movie that, like Altered States, spoke to a new post-hippie caveat on the psychic fallout of excess experimentation on the more nebulous zones of the mind. Along with Dr. Lillian (Louise Fletcher), Dr. Mike develops a technology that records a person’s sensory experience so that others can share it by wearing a sort of headset and pressing replay.

Of course the nefarious US military doesn’t skip a beat, already exploiting the device before it’s even finished, salivating over possibilities running the gamut from flight simulation to torture. And Mike’s coworkers, too, dig in to sample the Pandora’s box of psychedelic chocolates, with one of them finally collapsing from the equivalent of an Internet porn binge. So this is in essence a story about the price of dreaming in the Promethean sense.

Directed by Douglas Trumbull, who made Silent Running (72) and worked effects for 2001 (68), and taken from a story by Bruce Joel Rubin, who’d later script Ghost (90) and Jacob’s Ladder (90), Brainstorm becomes self-consciously trippy and intellectually flabby. It probably seemed too hokey in its time, but reading it with the benefit of hindsight, one of the ways in which it’s aged surprisingly well is in its relationship with numerous movies spawned in its wake. Its promise of artificially reconstructed experience, a virtual reality into which an individual’s memories and other sprays of subjective psychic foam can infiltrate, looks forward to the technologically-enhanced nostalgia of Strange Days (95), the virtual reality addicts in eXistenZ (99), the memory control as romantic catalyst in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (04), and the pseudo-schizophrenic epidemic of A Scanner Darkly (05). We can trace in such films a dialogue on perception whose resonance with our ongoing plunge into electronic everything is so acute it hardly needs stating.

But I got us into this talking about Walken, and the pleasing array of nuance he brings to Brainstorm is surely one of the best reasons to see it. He’s an actor whose little choices intrigue. At one point he blows a fuse and rants while suddenly gobbling from a bag of Ruffles. And I find it extremely interesting that the filmmakers chose to imbue Mike with a very complicated romantic life. Perhaps this man obsessed with the cataloguing of experience has a thing for older women because they simply have more of it then he does. At the movie’s outset, he’s breaking up with Karen (Natalie Wood), his wife and the mother of his child. He seems to be romantically entangled with Lillian. Fletcher would have been pushing 50 at the time of filming, while Wood was 43. True, Walken was already in his late 30s, but he looks strikingly younger than both women on screen, and given that this is a Hollywood movie the difference makes a hell of an impression. Mike’s relationship to these women, and Walken’s different ways of expressing affection and admiration for both, deepens our sense of the character’s conflicting desires, his ruthless drive toward success and his undeniable attraction to woman of intelligence and integrity.

And, yes, Wood was beautiful. Those dark eyes stop Walken in his tracks. The finale has Wood urging Walken back from the brink of death through the sheer intensity of her love, and the scene is made poignant by extra-filmic circumstances. In November of 1981, near the end of principal photography, Wood died when she fell overboard of the yacht she shared with her husband, the actor Robert Wagner. Wagner and Walken were both on board at the time. The yacht was named Splendour.