Singularly Impressive

In the latest edition of Standpoint, Peter Whittle reviews the forthcoming film adaptation of A Single Man

"Grief is the price we pay for love," was the Queen's message to the American people after 9/11. That seems exactly right. But in everyday life, many delay the final accounting. Some put off payment altogether. Others have the courage to look at the bill square-on, but find that for them, the cost is simply too great to bear.

One such is George, the single man of the title of Christopher Isherwood's short novel, which has just been adapted for the screen. George, played by Colin Firth, is an English college lecturer in early Sixties, pre-counter-cultural California, a place of effortless golden-limbed sunniness. But he makes his way through this world like a dead man walking. Jim (Matthew Goode), his partner of 16 years, has been killed in a road accident and he now operates like a human being only on the outside. Grief has hollowed him out.

A Single Man (on release 12 February) follows him over the space of a day: his fastidious early morning grooming routine; his journey to work; the pleasantries he exchanges with neighbours; and his conversations with Charlotte (Julianne Moore), his best friend from earlier London days. Thoughts and memories of Jim come in flashback. The only distinctive thing to happen is a series of encounters with one of his young students (Nicholas Hoult), a boy who senses that there is something wrong about his teacher, something that might shed light on his own emotional confusion. This being the early Sixties, little is spelt out between them. George lives with his emptiness in secret.

Rereading those paragraphs above — gay relationships, death, suppressed mourning — I can see how this film might seem to hold little for a wide audience. That doesn't stop it from being a remarkably powerful, beautiful one. Being gay myself has much to do with this. I have watched thousands of movies and even now, in 2009, it comes as an utter, blessed relief for me to see one depicting a relationship between men that doesn't just revolve around the obstacles against a youthful "coming out", or a death from Aids, or an addiction to dancing and shopping. A Single Man is an adult film, George, Jim and Charlotte are grown-ups and the themes which give rise to the story — the disappointments of age, the nature of love, how one continues when the most valued part of one's life has been ripped out of it — are of the sort which our infantilised society increasingly refuses even to acknowledge, let alone discuss.

The film is directed by Tom Ford, known to you, I'm sure, as a fashion designer, the face for some time of the newly-revived Gucci. Ford, self-conscious and preening on the red carpet, has always struck me as the epitome of an unlikeable metrosexual sensibility. So initially my heart had sunk at the prospect of an over-produced, under-nourished piece of style fetishism. Certainly, there are moments when he has obviously reined in (or been forced to rein in) a strongly developed love of the look of things, of mid-century modernism and the way a jacket creases. The characters are all better looking than they would probably be, even in California. But these are quibbles. Ford's entry into movie-making is genuinely impressive. The surfaces are there and they gleam, but they remain just that — surfaces. They never get in the way of what is an enormously detailed, humane exploration of the effect one life can have on another.

Above all however, the film's power is down to Colin Firth. I have never quite understood the appeal of Firth, and his screen presence I generally find chilly and supercilious, wet-shirted or otherwise. But as George, he demonstrates the very essence of great film acting: he does so little, and conveys so much. There is no thrashing about, no wild gestures. It all happens beneath the skin. From the moment he constructs himself in the mirror first thing in the morning, to the brief, sweet connection he makes with his neighbour's little girl, there isn't a moment when you don't believe him. The pain he endures, etched in his movements and the awkwardness of his social encounters, becomes equally unbearable for us to witness.

Or not, perhaps, for everybody. When I watched A Single Man, I was faced with the imminent death of one beloved. The critic who claims to be able to divorce himself from his own condition when considering the work before him is, I think, being dishonest. Our judgment is clouded just as much by happiness as by sadness. But perhaps it also means that we become more acutely aware of the fake and the fraudulent. The cinema is full of ersatz suffering, including much which one might once have considered nuanced and authentic. One becomes very alive to anything remotely near the truth. And that, in its way, gives us comfort.

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A Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the NCF

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BATTLING BELIEF

The Right should embrace secularism, writes Guy Stagg

Some arguments are whispered when they should be shouted. If the Right criticises multiculturalism, too often they are satirised. Equally, when conservatives speak out against religious extremism, their concerns are drawn in cartoon. Both arguments are lost to caricature, made to sound like the Carlton Club choir warming up for a verse of Rule Britannia.

These criticisms, these concerns, are real, yet perceived by many as ideological prejudices. But there is another language in which they may be articulated, one free from political parody. That language is secularism.

From a secular perspective, multiculturalism discourages the integration of immigrant communities. In promoting ethnic disparities, it deepens ethnic divisions. In celebrating spiritual differences, it intensifies them. The Right can agree that the basic principle of multiculturalism – that immigrant communities can be defined as homogenous groups that are fundamentally different – is a mistake.

But crucially, religion is the means by which this mistake is enforced – and secularism is the strongest position from which to expose this fact. Therefore, when local funding is organised along religious lines, and sponsors faith schools and faith-based community centres, authorities propagate this mistake. When the Archbishop of Canterbury claims that Sharia Law is both inevitable and desirable in this country, he threatens to enshrine the mistake.

However religion holds a protected position in debate which prevents these grievances from being fully addressed. Religion expects a level of respect that we afford no other intellectual position. Indeed, it is doctrinally demanded. When criticism is equated to blasphemy, all manner of sins – misogyny, homophobia and abuse – are privileged with immunity.

With extreme religion this becomes not a matter of academic theology but of political policy. But until debate frees itself from the rhetoric of reverence, the political process will be hampered. Moderate religion has a responsibility here. Moderate religion, in failing to confront its more prejudiced bedfellows, gives them unvoiced acceptance, and even provides unintended support. And yes, Islam is most culpable in this respect. Yet so is the Left, which for the sake of tolerance condemns not the perpetrators, but the victims of extremism. Too few Conservatives expressed disgust at those on the Left who proposed that the US was responsible for the terrorist atrocities on September 11th.

Indeed, the Left’s relationship with secularism is surprisingly fraught. Socialism was once considered the breeding ground for secularism, and to this day it is the left-wing press that gives atheism a platform. But for the likes of Christopher Hitchens their condemnation is frequently turned against the Left, against what Johann Hari characterised as the ‘tolerance of the fanatically intolerant’.

On the other hand, the historical yoking of the Tories with Anglicanism means that Conservatives feel they should support religion, at least in its politest forms. So atheists on the Right stay quiet: arguing that religion is a comfort to others, and the values it teaches are a benefit to society. Such silence is both cowardly and patronising.

There is a chocolate box picture of England which would be incomplete if the pint of warm beer and the figures on a cricket green did not have a village church as their backdrop. And there is a monument to Toryism somewhere in the imagination of Middle England built on the pillars of God, King and Country. But Conservatism in this form slides from sentimentalism to intellectual sloth. Religion is not fundamental to the Right, as Hume realised two and a half centuries ago.

At the last Conservative Party Conference Baroness Warsi blamed a state-sponsored secularism for the ills of multiculturalism, and proposed more religion as the solution. This was an extraordinary confusion of the disease for the cure, and yet passed without comment. Conservatives need a strong secular voice to correct multiculturalism and to protect us from extreme religion. The time has come for atheists on the Right to stand up for what they don’t believe in.

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To the Barricades!

It looks like the theatre is gearing up nicely for a General Election early next year.

The Royal Court in London's Sloane Square will be showing Posh, a new play by Laura Wades, from April 9th to May 22nd.

'In an oak-panelled room in Oxford, ten young bloods with cut-glass vowels and deep pockets are meeting, intent on restoring their right to rule,' goes the description. 'Members of an elite student dining society, the boys are bunkering down for a wild night of debauchery, decadence and bloody good wine. But this isn’t the last huzzah: they’re planning a takeover...Welcome to the Riot Club.'

Ms Wade, 32, has said that staging the play during an election campaign would "undoubtedly raise questions" about the Tories' ability to govern.

Daring new writing? This sounds almost charming in its quaintness. Who said that the theatre is running out of new ideas?

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