From left to right: Nicholas Hoult, Tom Ford, Colin Firth and Matthew Goode

This movie is absolutely wonderful. Heartfelt, brilliant, sensitive and beautiful. I loved it so much, I saw it twice. Colin Firth should be nominated for an Oscar for his role as George Falconer in A Single Man.

The story is simple; the complex layers of emotion are not. In 1962, George 52 years old, is a Briton who transplanted to L.A. There, he has been an English professor for years. George is also gay at a time – the early ’60s – when being open about such things wasn’t commonplace. Gay men and women were “invisible” to the rest of the world. No one talked about it. The man George loves, Jim (Matthew Goode), has died, sending him first into depression and then on a mission to simply end it all.

Matthew Goode

Our tragedy actually begins on the day George has decided will be his last. George was in a 16-year relationship with his lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), until Jim died in a car accident eight months earlier. The agony took hold at once: As he received the horrible news from a member of Jim’s family, he was told the funeral was for family only.

Fashion designer Tom Ford, who made a name as the glamour guy at Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and now with his own label, has constructed an impressive directing debut out of Christopher Isherwood’s dark novel. A character study is a good fit, giving Ford the chance to use what he knows about staging, which is considerable. Life and death are equally beautiful, equally seductive, as are the sets, the faces, the cars and the clothes of the 60s, which Ford designed himself. Everything on-screen mirrors the time “spot on.” No detail is random, whether the clocks that tick as George moves through his final day, the people he encounters, the vending machines, the burial suit meticulously laid out with “a Windsor knot” noted on the card placed over the tie.

This is a love story and whether you’re heterosexual, bisexual, gay or whatever – you will feel the depth of emotion in this film. You will cry for Jim and George – watching the beauty of love unfold on the screen like a paintbrush stroking colors and images onto a canvass. Director of Photography is Eduard Grau and he does a beautiful job. The film begins and ends with a kiss, gentle and chaste, setting a tone that will stay. (Even Jim’s death is beautiful and forlorn, exhibiting the kind of loneliness and pain that is almost too much to bear.) As a line in the movie points out, “Sometimes, awful things have their own kind of beauty.”

Since Jim’s death, George has walked through what’s left of his life. He lives in a beautiful “glass house” in Santa Monica and tries to teach literature to uninterested students; he waves at the neighbors next door while despising their shallowness. He lectures to his indifferent students, speaking in code about the hatred of minorities. He declines the advances of a flirtatious Spanish gay hustler. He shares cocktails and old jokes with a fellow Brit, Charley (Julianne Moore), a washed up divorcee with whom George once had a brief affair. She’s really his only true friend and even she doesn’t fully understand that gay relationships are “real” relationships. And at the end of the day, in the same beachfront bar where he met Jim, George finds himself pursued by an admiring, flirtatious and young student (Nicholas Hoult, the kid in About a Boy, who has grown into a blue-eyed beauty). Ford and co-writer David Scearce have added an element of suspense you won’t find in Isherwood’s book: George’s intention to commit suicide before day’s end.

George goes through the steps of tidying up his affairs before putting a revolver in his mouth and relieving the pain. Yet, judging by an almost-farcical scene of false starts, perhaps George is still a long way from the brink.

Ford’s movie, like the novel, is an inner journey, weaving pungent memories into the everyday details of George’s life. A Single Man derives its power from Firth’s coiled performance. In black-rimmed glasses that make him look like Nelson Rockefeller or Michael Caine, Firth is wonderful as a reserved professor who is concealing unbearable anguish and pain, without the emotional outbursts that most actors would need to make the point.

Firth’s work should earn him an Oscar nomination. He was already nominated for a Golden Globe, which went to Jeff Bridges instead. Firth should have won it. He is remarkable. His staunchest fans, though, will probably continue to pine for a sequel to Pride and Prejudice.

Go see A Single Man today. It will teach you about love and tolerance and maybe, even, make you a better person.