endings ... hmmm

We watched A Single Man tonight. It's a poignant love story, and a meditation on life, and what makes it worth living. Whether you end up drawing the same conclusions as the film is beside the point. The insights offered stand regardless of the heavy-handed work at the end of this one.

Colin Firth plays George Falconer, an English English professor living in Los Angeles since WW2. He's forlorn over the death of his lover of sixteen years. We catch him at the beginning of, as he puts it, "a very big day." He intends to commit suicide. As we observe his meticulous preparations (he sets out his funeral suit, with the instruction to tie the tie in a full Windsor knot) we also see that his life is rich with people and possibilities that he seems unwilling to recognize. He lives in this wonderful house, he has great style, and his students, at least one of them, seem to care about him.

In fact, when that one student takes the initiative, it breaks him out of his woe and self-pity. He looks out at the orange moon, coloured by the smog of the city, and is reminded, visually, of an earlier character's comment that even ugly circumstances can bring about beautiful results. So he sees the possibilities again, puts away the gun, burns the notes, and gets ready to continue his life.

Why then (Spoiler alert! (This is for you, Lois!) I feel I can't complete this comment on the film without referring to the ending ) must we still kill him off with a heart attack? It's an old, sentimentalist, and hacked device intended to approach "tragedy" but I find it weak and cheap. In fact it's a kind (the worst kind) of Christian ending: He's had his Damascus Road experience, he can see clearly now, so it's time to take him home to his maker, or in this case, to his dead lover (who appears in order to provide the bookend to the opening scene). In this situation, the more brave, less sentimental way to confront this is to allow the man to keep on struggling. We know that the clarity of his revelation will be tested. We know that he'll run out of gas again and lay out the suit, with the notes. We know that just because you stave off that mortal impulse, that it will return.

Everything in this film is well-set, until the ending yanks the table-cloth. To provide this escape hatch via a massive, unforeseen heart attack constitutes a shirking of the challenge of any work of serious fiction to examine and imagine anew the truth of what it is to live and love and yet to know that the brightness of the present moment will fade into the ugliness and smog of the next.

A good chaser/companion to this film would be the Coen brothers A Serious Man. And then of course, The Big Lebowski, if not just to reset the lane.