Chloe

At the beginning of this film, a beautiful young woman, who is clearly a beautiful young prostitute, narrates in a nasal voice-over a completely unnecessary vignette about becoming each client's “living, breathing, unflinching dream.” At least, we have the impression that this is unnecessary. But once we have finished watching Chloe we realize that this throwaway piece, which could have preambled any X-rated feature, is actually the key to the film (admittedly, I found the first two minutes so annoying as to consider the possibility that this was indeed the intention of the director). An explanation for our about-face will not be granted on these pages, in no small part because the work has its reasons for doing what it does. In fact, it has reasons aplenty.

Our young beauty is Chloe Sweeney (Amanda Seyfried) and her bailiwick appears to be the ironically yclept world of the 'high-class hooker,' as if class can be bestowed by clothes or hourly rates. No, the only term we can use is expensive, as in all the items and habits in the life of Chloe’s clients. Some of these clients even flaunt their desires before open daytime windows, such as the one to the Toronto office of gynecologist Catherine Stewart (Julianne Moore). The doctor – who must be supremely well-regarded if she can afford such real estate – has her gaze out the window interrupted by her assistant and assumes an embarrassed mien she will maintain for almost the entire film. Why would a noonday tryst with an expensive whore fascinate an affluent married mother? A few possibilities cross our minds before we are introduced to her husband, musicologist David Stewart (Liam Neeson). A friend of mine once called Neeson the best-looking man in the Western world and this may be the movie in which her claim is upheld. We find Professor Stewart lecturing at a New York university auditorium, three-quarters of which are packed with starry-eyed female co-eds, with the topic of today’s class being this opera. It is here that his students ask him out to dinner, to which he replies that he is obliged to be home because, after all, it’s his birthday. The way in which he replies could mean two, perhaps three things – the repeated chain of ambiguity provides the film’s innate strength – and we are whisked back to Toronto to an absurdly beautiful house filled with absurdly beautiful guests, all awaiting the birthday boy (this includes one of Dr. Stewart's colleagues, Frank, who makes a lewd joke every time he sees Catherine, although it is never really about Catherine). David of course misses his flight – does anyone in the movies ever arrive either on time or unscathed to a surprise party?  And the reason why he missed it, if that is really the reason (we were told earlier he had ninety minutes to catch his flight) sidles up next to him, the same starry-eyed coed who asked him out to dinner. The problem is that she does her sidling just as her dear professor and his cell phone inform his crestfallen wife that he will not be back from New York tonight, a message she will have to relay to her two hundred-odd guests.

What ensues is predictable, almost woefully predictable at times (Catherine just so happens to walk by David's cell phone which just so happens to betray some information about his birthday night), but the payoff is not nearly as straightforward. After deciding that David, esteemed professor and a dashingly handsome fellow with a funny accent, is most certainly unfaithful, Catherine begins to sink into the morass of paranoid despair. They attend a Vivaldi performance with their adolescent son Michael (Max Thieriot) and his girlfriend Anna (Nina Dobrev), but Catherine can only stare at David's left cheek in toothy outrage. They proceed without the horny teenagers – a prior scene shows Catherine powerless to stop their coupling under her own roof (“This can't happen every night”) – to dinner with Frank the lecherous bastard and his tart of the month.  Catherine looks on with horror as David Giovanni all too naturally responds to the waitress's usual query by asking her, by name, what she likes to drink. To clear her spinning head she visits the petit coin and just so happens to run into Chloe, who just so happens to be crying in the neighboring stall, which just so happens to have run out of toilet paper. Ever the caregiver (her Hippocratic oath will be tested on more than one occasion), Catherine comforts Chloe who tells her from beneath stall partitions that men are such jerks – well, she uses a slightly more emphatic term. All this is fine and good, and yet we sense a strange undercurrent, perhaps because Moore, that infinitely subtle actress, seems to sense it, too. Then Chloe just so happens to find (or produce by legerdemain) a massive hair clip that looks uncannily like a dagger and offers it to Catherine. She politely declines the gift and leaves, but we know something Catherine merely intuits. When Catherine comes back, Frank and David are playing “spot the hooker,” which diverts Catherine's attention back to Chloe in a corner with a man she obviously does not like. In the car ride home ensue some thinly-veiled questions to David – who must either not love his wife or be a complete imbecile, or perhaps a bit of both – as to what he was doing on his birthday night and why he was so nice to Delia the waitress, and how many other waitresses has he treated so kindly, and so forth. Another vignette rehashes some elements of the opening scene and Catherine now knows what we know: that the girl in the ladies' room is the expensive hooker she caught herself watching. Our two female leads will meet again, in that same upmarket restaurant, and a deal will be struck whose language gives away much more than we suspect at the time, so on further details we will remain comfortably mum. 

Egoyan is a marvelous director, even if he is too willingly drawn to lurid subjects (such as in this film, not to my liking at the time and maybe due for a re-viewing). His eye for detail, however, is unfailing: the rapid contrast, for example, easily missed in the theater, of the giant portrait of Catherine holding a reluctant Michael as a child, to that nymphet-like being sidling up to David and unquestionably young enough to be his daughter; or Chloe's gently defensive expression when Catherine storms out of one of their meetings; or Catherine's own reaction when Chloe interrupts her story with a violent sneeze. Egoyan based his work on a French film that I detested, a tribute to a tighter script, sensational cinematography, and generally superb acting. I have not retained Nathalie... in the minute vividness with which I tend to remember remarkable movies, which means that I must have been horribly bored, a charge I could not possibly raise against Chloe. That said, one problem is immediately evident: the role of Nathalie or Chloe must go to someone extremely young, innocent-looking, and not at all imbued with womanly wits (Béart, while gorgeous, was forty at the time Nathalie... was filmed), and in this superficial regard Seyfried is a godsend. Yet Chloe would likely be doomed without an actress like Moore: Neeson is essentially playing himself with a half-Irish accent, and there are few roles less challenging than that of a prostitute, whose every wink, gesture, and movement can be controlled and purchased, not unlike those of the thespian himself. That is not to say that Seyfried and Neeson are not good actors; they most certainly are. But they ultimately feed off the energy and fears generated by Moore, even when Seyfried begins, in the film's latter half, to live up to her titular billing. The ending is neither thoroughly convincing nor foreseeable, but it is a distinct option given the persons we have met and the ambitions they have evinced. And what about Michael, the only molecular combination of Catherine and David, the sullen teenager whom David casually mentions is in therapy, although the reason for such measures is never stated, the sensitive musical prodigy who gets dumped on Skype by his tantalizing girlfriend and then just so happens to meet a pretty blonde girl who likes musicians? Let's just say some qualities do not bother to skip generations.   

Open Hearts

We are, said a wise man a long time ago, nothing more than the sum of our choices. Freewill remains the constant in the universe that allows our lives to rotate with the planets or in counterpoise, but in each case with distinctive energy that some of us humble dreamers dare to call souls. What is strange about these two assertions is that people disassociate freewill from any type of faith because, they claim, faith involves submission, accepting one's destiny, and, most criminally, divesting oneself of any responsibility for one's decisions. Now I am all for freewill. I truly believe that with determination, persistence, and optimism (and, admittedly, some luck), just about anything can be achieved. One man can choose not to retaliate and inspire a whole multiethnic nation to walk the path of least resistance; one woman can devote her life to helping those whom the world wishes were never born; and a man who survived orphanages, war, P.O.W. camps, cancer, expatriation, and one of the most brutal and oppressive regimes in modern history can win the Nobel Prize for literature. In addition to their faith, all of these heroes – and it is much harder to be a hero when you choose not to resort to violence – share an indomitable will. A will to do what is morally right for the world, even if such a scenario costs them everything they hold dear. Of course, it is not the task of every person to enact mass reform, nor to lead millions onto the righteous path, nor to sacrifice himself for the greater good of mankind. No, to most of us hyperbole does not apply. Most of us have enough to deal with in the small ambit of our private life, a locus which can be just as tragic as a national catastrophe. Which brings us to this film about choice.

We are introduced to two couples at different stages of their development. The first, young and freshly engaged, are Cecilie (Sonja Richter) and Joachim (Nikolaj Lie Kaas). Life began the day they met and has improved as they have grown together, sharing the tender smiles of those who understand fate as the reflection of our desires and the influence of something greater still. It is in the rays of this omnipotent sun that they bask, drunk on the sweetness of things, in love so wonderful and profound that we suspect that it cannot last for the entirety of a motion picture. Indeed, they stay enamored and cooing until Joachim gets out of a parked car and is promptly run down by a motorist who never saw him. That motorist is Marie (Paprika Steen), and her collision with Joachim can be attributed to an argument she was having at the wheel with her hellcat teenage daughter Stine. 

Marie is half of the second couple in our love trapezoid with her surgeon husband, Niels (Mads Mikkelsen). Now in their mid- to late thirties, Niels and Marie lead a steady bourgeois life with three children and a comfortable home in one of Copenhagen's more privileged quarters; in other words, this idyllic structure is as likely to crumble as the blissful, energetic, and impecunious world of Cecilie and Joachim. And fate's wicked game has already assumed its course: upon learning how Joachim ended up in his hospital's intensive care unit, Niels feels a certain affection towards Cecilie, who is much younger and lovelier than his loyal wife. He begins, as men are supposed to do when they court, with small gifts of his time and money. Once the extent of Joachim's injury has been fully ascertained, however, Niels feels obliged to replace the lost happiness that Cecilie might never find again and let her love blossom anew – or some other excuse for what he lacks in his marriage. After all, it was Niels's wife and daughter who took away Cecilie's love, so wouldn't all be fair in the solar system if he could restore some of her trust in human bonds? Not to mention that Joachim, given the severity of his injury, has nothing but the nastiest words for the person he once loved.

Without making light of the talent on hand, as well as the sublime threads that intertwine at just the right moments, the plot as described above could have been culled from any ordinary soap opera and kicked out to its melodramatic limits. Yet the four actors weave their emotions slowly, hesitatingly, as if unsure what the next scene will bring and cognizant that what they say might be later held against them. What we witness is the finest form of semi-improvisation possible in cinematic form, and one rarely employed in the inevitable plots of inevitable commercial films with inevitable revenues. Open hearts, a rather poor pun on Niels's profession and the amenability of his heart and that of Cecilie's to overcome societal obstacles and attempt a life together, has a certain appeal yet does not translate the original Danish, Elsker dig for evigt ("Love you forever"). The simplicity of that last phrase and the decision to pronounce it sincerely to another human being, that may be the hardest choice of all.

The Silence

Our first glance at this film suggests incomprehensibility: two blonde women in their thirties and a small, equally blond boy are training to parts unknown from parts unknown; the heat is unbearable in the compartment; outside, a single file of tanks parallels the train's progress; and on the compartment door sits a sign in a language that no one, including the viewer, has ever seen before. Soon one of the women will get violently ill, the three of them will disembark, and our action – if that is really the right word – will be moved to a hotel in a very foreign city, a subdued metropolis from every indication on the brink of war.   

We learn in time that the two women, Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), are sisters; the boy, Johan, is Anna's, although from how Johan interacts with his aunt, it is clear that she exerts considerable influence upon him. Like many siblings, Ester and Anna go out of their way to emphasize their differences. While the older Ester is lonely, cultured, and intellectual (she works as a literary translator), a raging alcoholic, and probably a manic depressive to boot, Anna is decidedly none of the above. In fact, what Anna is and is not made The Silence, at the time of its release, a revelatory picture, even if the revelations seem tepid and stale in hindsight – but first we must return to that train. An internet search for "Nitsel stantnjon palik," the train door sign, yields links exclusively on The Silence, which means that we are dealing with invention.  (An educated guess might be "no smoking when in the station" since palić is "to smoke" in Polish, the middle word resembles a misbegotten calque of "station," and the first word could be a Slavic homophone of "incomplete" – "smoking [is allowed] not having reached the station.") Two later words – and words will be very important in a film that underscores soundlessness – kasi ("hand") and naigo ("face") appear to be Estonian. So when, in a fabulous scene, Anna opens up a newspaper knowing full well she'll only be able to look at the pictures, all the words seem familiar in a sense that they might be words from various European tongues. Someone more politically sensitive than I would avouch that this means all of Europe is at war, Babel as a metaphor for battle, but I refrain. What the language isolate does imply, however, is the need for non-verbal communication, gestures, looks, and, of course, the other senses: smells, tastes, and whatever can be deemed tactile. During the course of the film, both Ester and Anna will maintain a relationship with a male waiter – Ester with the hotel's old and attentive servant, Anna with a libidinous young man from a street café – with whom she does not share a language. Nevertheless, both women are convinced of the significance of each relationship and are pleased at the distance the lack of language permits them ("How nice that we don't understand one another," says Anna to her partner).                    

Why do they need that distance? That is the mystery of The Silence, one of the few first-rate films that become more obfuscated, not clearer, upon re-viewing. This ambiguity, I fear, is predominantly caused by modern minds who are hell-bent on seeing things in the worst or, rather, most sinful or crooked way possible (an inevitability Bergman appears to anticipate). Thus the most popular and incorrect explanation of The Silence is provoked by Anna's brief visit to a movie theater in which she happens to catch a man and woman coupling vigorously and obliviously. As if, one might venture, Anna were not there at all – the very act of cinematography. Other scenes seem to point in the same, bawdy direction, but actually do no such thing: a bathing scene in which Anna asks Johan to lather her back –  there is no other person to ask but Ester, who is both incapacitated and, as we will learn, unwilling; Anna's decision to sleep topless next to her ten-year-old son, who has seen her thus since, well, the very beginning of their relationship; Anna's sessions with the waiter, who craved her the moment he saw her open that local newspaper and understand absolutely nothing; in one amazing scene, Anna's walking through the streets for almost a minute and being surrounded only by men; and the rather weighty dialogue towards the film's middle, when Anna and Ester bicker like jealous lovers. The sexual undercurrent seems even more important given its notoriety as the first major Swedish film to feature a gamut of risqué scenes, but such silliness need not concern us here. What we can say about these vignettes is that they are in line with the plot: they are neither gratuitous nor somehow stylized to invoke greater meaning (when there exists nothing of the sort). In point of fact, if we accept ten-year-old Johan as the film's true protagonist, then these discoveries abate drastically in sensation, because, of course, all such moments are sensational to a budding adolescent.

Accept Johan as the protagonist? Most certainly: Bergman has been labeled the most autobiographical of directors for good reason, as his stories are about individual doubts, not wars of ideas in which individuals are conscripted. His heroes struggle with faith like the Romantic poets struggled with love: in each case this represented the most elusive and vital element of life. And like the Romantic poets approached love in myriad ways, with poem after poem dedicated to one or another princesse lointaine, so did Bergman address the serious questions about his Christianity by examining it through individual perspectives that all funneled back into him. As a ten-year-old, Johan's faith begins and perhaps ends with his mother and aunt, and he is hopeful to "return home" to his grandmother (some mention is made of his father, but the latter is clearly not much involved); yet something inside him does allow for the contemplation of a large and fleshy painting in the style of this artist. Walking the halls of the surprisingly grand, if empty, hotel, he comes upon a troupe of dwarfs, who do not imbue him with the same feelings of awkwardness as they would an adult. The titular silence then becomes what is never said to a child, what is withheld, omitted, censored, or distorted, all in the name of protecting him, of maintaining his innocence in a world racked by war, pornography, alcoholism, and hatred. He gazes through the window one evening to see a tank occupying the entire street, like the tanks he spotted from the train, a little boy's dream and a father's nightmare. It is through Johan's eyes that we notice the different ways in which his mother and aunt comb their hair and regard themselves in mirrors; it is also of little coincidence that Johan is reading this book in Swedish translation. After all, little boys love adventures about much bigger boys who get in and out of danger. But who, sooner or later, make it back home to grandma's house.          

Seven Pounds

All people who are possessed by writing will begin, for better or worse, with critiques of their predecessors; they will grandly dismiss some easy targets, dissect the more subtle culprits and in general claim that there is practically nothing out there worth reading (sometimes, the more panic-stricken among us will announce a "crisis" in art). To be sure, these are the rantings of the young and unsung. The trick is moving past this negativity into a clear system of observation and criticism, shedding the alb of high-and-mighty wisdom, and stipulating some unshakeable criteria for evaluating what we read. Over time I have come to see that the works I admire share one commonality: they know right from wrong. They may indeed deal with religious themes in which moralizing comes with the territory; but, as it were, they more typically involve much more earthbound topoi, plain and daily situations that require decisions based on good and simple values. What is remarkable about our day and age is how many people – most of them, sadly, believers in no force greater than a black hole – cannot endure the application of such values. Kindness, benevolence, mercy, discipline, selflessness, sacrifice, righteousness, courage, patience, understanding, and, above all, sympathy – all these have been deemed the hallmarks of some naive brand of altruism that was really popular, oh about two thousand years ago, and has since fallen out of fashion. More disturbing still is when someone tries to do good with no reward to himself, he is labeled as egotistical and motivated by messianic urges, as if the latter were some kind of disease. For your information, if everyone were possessed by a sliver, by a wispy fraction of the goodness that was inculcated into our consciousness so many centuries before, we would not have the destruction, terror, and hatred that continue to plague us. It remains a matter of debate, however, as to whether we would have something akin to this film.

That we are dealing with a burdensome choice of self-sacrifice is clear from the opening scene: a distraught man (Will Smith) in his thirties calls a Los Angeles emergency hotline to announce a suicide. "Who is the victim of the suicide?" asks the helpful, disembodied voice. After a few moments of painful reflection, he responds with only two words: "I am." The rest of the film will be a prelude to this horrific moment, and it is our task to evaluate whether such melodrama is worth almost two hours of our time. The man in question is subsequently revealed to be Ben Thomas, an IRS agent and inspector who is certainly not what he appears to be. Proof of this simple fact lies in his first inspection: he parks at a nursing home and throws a nasty look at the director's car, a brand-new German vehicle of considerable value. He enters and interviews the director, a revolting, money-grubbing lout ironically named Goodman who has cut spending in the home by seventeen percent, cannot pay his back taxes (he is currently asking for an extension), and yet has still managed to buy a sports car and give himself a raise – all of which may sound eerily familiar to citizens of certain privileged countries. Nevertheless, his greed is surpassed by something far worse: he has been punishing a helpless old woman who refuses to take her medicine by not allowing her to be bathed. Once Ben discovers this fact, he rescinds any possibility for an extension and we feel modestly redeemed. Redeemed not only because every single person should be appalled at how we neglect and discard the elderly, but also because this has always been the calling card of a society predicating social Darwinism and the destruction of the weak. Shortly thereafter, Ben retreats to a beachside house that a tax inspector would be unlikely to be able to afford and has a couple of flashbacks (never mind that the whole film is, in essence, a flashback). In his hazy somnolence he is no longer a tax inspector, but an aeronautical engineer and, against every other indication we have had so far, he is not all alone: he has a young wife who no longer happens to exist. His phone rings, and we learn he also has a brother (Michael Ealy) who is worried about him; indeed, that short conversation with his brother is punctuated by one of Ben's few displays of anger. And, given the film's title, it is equally revealing that he then irately lists seven names, the first three all with the surname Anderson, and the last a female with his own. So I give nothing away by stating that, about twenty minutes in, the arc of the story has already been formed: a young man with a certain amount of clout will give his life to help those who cannot help themselves, a noble ambition stemming from the likelihood that he is responsible for the death of seven people, including, it appears, his wife.  

A few more important details: on his desk, near his phone in that lonely beachfront property, Ben has another list of names. Quick-eyed viewers can discern the word "match" on it, which is more than you need to know. Then there is a display of cruelty on the phone to Ezra Turner (Woody Harrelson), a blind customer service agent to whom Ben imparts his name as well as a few bits of biographical guesswork that would bring lesser men to rage. But Ezra reacts with shame and dignity and politely hangs up the phone, unpossessed of indignation, which cannot be said of those scenes where Ben chides his worst enemy, his past self.  If Ben's heavyheartedness is devastating and all-encompassing, we might wonder why his brave and selfless acts will probably make so many viewers squirm. The same viewers, mind you, who weep at the most sentimental war movies, cheer on the charming gangsters in the modernized westerns that have become so prolific, and praise works for their "moral ambiguity" (when you see this phrase, you know you need to find something better to read). Could it be that most of humanity envies those few souls who actually uphold the good and moral values that might be our salvation? Could there be anything more ignominious than resenting the legitimate sacrifices of others by claiming that they just want to draw attention to themselves? Or perhaps we should concentrate on another locus of emotional manipulation, Ben's romance with Emily (Rosario Dawson), who could really, really use a new heart to replace her rather dysfunctional one? Those IRS fellows are quite a magnanimous bunch.           

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Smith

A Single Man

The changes that occur in the material world may seem overwhelmingly great, but they are nothing if our internal designs remain unaltered. Some souls enjoy being caught up in the hoopla – protesting the latest war, denouncing the latest villain, celebrating the latest triumph of the human spirit – and this is all quite commendable. And yet attentive monitoring of these movements suggests that it is not so much their laudable ends that matter, but the fact that they matter at all. People, in other words, want to feel like they have lived through something of importance. If your whole concept of right and wrong and interesting and banal is confined to the material world, you will have a lot of newspapers to read but may have precious little time for art. Art, of course, also has its faddists. And modern art's inherent flaw is that it must continuously attempt to be modern, which means that its values will be shaped around whatever the loathsome "spirit of the times" dictates (one recent novel featured a character who records background sounds at airports to sell to adulterous husbands, one of the most chilling examples of creative bankruptcy you will ever find). True art, however, is eternal, and it is eternal because apart from technological advancements in its appurtenances it could occur at any place and at any time. Amidst the hubbub of the latest putsch and politicizing, it remains alone like a fortified beacon caressing the salty waves. May all the tyrants of the world be destroyed – I wish them all thunderous doom – and may we still enjoy works of splendid vision like this fine film.  

We begin, as we should given what follows, in a dream, but it is a dream of death. George Falconer (an extraordinary Colin Firth) walks along a snowy road to where a car has flipped over and ejected a young man's bleeding body. That young man is the thirty-something Jim (Matthew Goode). And when George comes closer and realizes that he will have to wait for another life or world to see Jim again, he lies down beside him and kisses him with the tenderness that can only be love or what we have always imagined love to be. There will be many moments like this in A Single Man, which is as much about George's inability to move past this loss as it is about the significance of all our breaths in general. George escapes from this hideous nightmare, one that must assault him often in myriad anagrams, and we note that the time is roughly three in the morning. That notation is vital as, like in any good Greek tragedy, we will see twenty-four hours of our hero, a small span of time for a fate to be decided. When he starts his day a couple of hours later, gone is all the psychic disorder and pain; in its place are puritan steadfastness and ritual. "It takes me a while to become George," a disembodied narrator informs us. "I look in the mirror and see not so much a face as the expression of a predicament." Some reviewers may seize upon this lovely observation as the money quote, and yet the more deeply we proceed into George's day, the less applicable the comment becomes.

A resident of Los Angeles for the past twenty-four years, George has loved his Jim for two-thirds of that period, and nothing of his love has abated since Jim's death in March of 1962. When he sifts through his American memories (we get nothing of Britain as if it never existed), there should be two Jim recollections for every one in which the former serviceman does not appear. Yet all we see and hear is Jim. Nothing of George's work as a college professor of literature is conveyed; nothing of any family members he has; nothing, as it were, that took place before meeting Jim in a jubilant postwar California bar and knowing that here was someone who would remain in his heart forever. Even Charley, née Charlotte (Julianne Moore), his former lover and lone confidante, recurs in a single memory, a horrible, wordless dream from that rainy night when he was dutifully informed by Jim's cousin that a fatal car crash had taken his love away. As he swallows his tears and announces his attendance at the funeral, the cousin coolly replies, "the service is just for family." Only a crude mind would equate the couple with their two smooth fox terriers that accompany Jim on his fatal drive (one dog dies with him and the other, "a small female," is unaccounted for), but the symbolism is obvious and galling. Is the main reason we feel a pinprick of remorse for this metaphor the way in which homosexual couples in the early 1960s were obliged to be invisible? That may be; one well-done if blunt scene in George's classroom hammers that point home. George has loved Jim; Jim loved George; but when one of them vanishes it is very much as if their relationship never happened at all. "Wasn't Jim a substitute for something else?" asks a smashed and still-hopeful Charley (Charley spends most of her day trying to look presentable enough to get bombed in public), which brings about one of George's eruptions at an otherwise sedate and very boozy dinner party for two. No, Jim was the real thing. Nothing on God's green earth could ever return those sixteen happy years and Jim will remain forever young and beautiful.

Many years ago I leafed through an Isherwood omnibus that included the original novel and was not particularly impressed, but that cursory judgment has no bearing on the screen adaptation. The quality of a film about love and loss is based squarely upon whether you care about the love forlorn, regardless of whether it takes place in a time of cholera or war or famine, or whether it at all answers to your own fantasies. A thin, at times gratuitous layer of topicality coats A Single Man, primarily from the mutually assured destruction that Cuban missiles were supposed to harbinger, a conceit that makes George's quandary at once trivial and earth-shattering. "If there's going to be a world with no time for sentiment," George declaims with a tone more befitting this actor, "then it's not a world I want to live in." And of what then is George's world composed? The One Day in the Life of George Falconer premise works not only because a couple of months' worth might have become an exercise in morosity, it also works because the director's natural eye for beauty and color as well as his fetish for the male body conspire into a stunning tapestry of soft moments. The odd, shy stares that George exchanges with his handsome student Kenny (Nicholas Hoult); his frank abuse of Charley's good offices; the lecherous smoke break with a Spanish rent boy (Jon Kortajarena); and the numerous occasions in which George notices eye color, desire, tension, or fear in his fellow humans. And of course, two scenes with Jim. In the first, Jim claims that he has never once slept with a woman ("Doesn't everyone sleep with women when they're young?" is George's glib rebuttal), which if true makes Jim different and pure, not like the thousands of gay men who have not only slept with women, but married, impregnated, and spent a lifetime with them because the life they really wanted could not so easily be lived. The second scene reveals the couple's reading choices (George is deep into this masterpiece) and, after some throwaway bravado on Jim's part, George's passionate devotion to his partner.  And as we know, every swan only has so many summers.