A singular bore

When a director shows at least a dozen extreme close-ups of eyes, it means he is either being artistic or incompetent.

In “A Single Man,” it doesn’t matter which -- the effect is the same. It is one of those movies so intent on being impressively (and oppressively) arty that it forgets to tell a story.

The film is based on what we can only assume is a very short story by Christopher Isherwood. It relates what happens during one day in the life of a grieving man whose true love died eight months before. It’s not a terribly busy day, but periodically he looks lovingly at an gun, calling to mind Camus’ famous dictum that the only question worth considering is whether or not to commit suicide.

In this particular case, which way he chooses couldn’t possibly make less difference to us.

Colin Firth shows less personality than usual as George Falconer, a professor of English at a California college in 1962. We are to understand George’s singular lack of vitality as a result of his deep grief over the loss of his love in a car wreck, but usually Firth is a nuanced enough actor to give us a glimpse of the man behind the pain.

Not so this time, and one suspects that might be because the filmmakers have an agenda in mind, rather than a plot. George’s dead lover was a man. The movie seems designed entirely to convince us squares that gay people can fall in love, too. That idea might have been revolutionary when the book was published in 1964, but now it seems more than a little pedestrian.

The man who thinks this is still a story worth telling in the 21st century is its writer and director, Tom Ford. Ford is a noted fashion designer, but he has zero experience in making movies, and it shows. As a writer, he gives his characters too little dialogue and then too much, and it comes out sounding like “Sometimes, awful things have their own kind of beauty.”

That line is said by a male prostitute. In Spanish.

Ford is even worse as a director, from his inability to draw a worthwhile performance from any of his actors (including Julianne Moore as George’s only friend) to his glacial pace. His fascination with extreme close-ups of eyeballs and lips appears to be related to his belief that they are the portals of attraction, but the repetitive depictions of them only add to the overall sluggishness.

In the meantime, Ford repeatedly takes the artiness one step too far. Early in the picture, for instance, he uses super-grainy film stock to show George driving past neighborhood children in slow motion, while a clock ticks loudly on the soundtrack. Any of those elements would have been fine alone, but taken all together they simply become too much.

Eventually, George is offered a way out of his doldrums by means of an exceptionally boring but pretty male student who would be more than happy to oblige. Which leads us in the audience to two questions: Will George find peace with this vacantly pretty young man? And will the cameraman ever find the right focus?