To be released tomorrow on DVD

The face of grief that the actor Colin Firth wears in A Single Man is crumpled and gray. There is little movement in the face initially: it’s a beautiful and gently furrowed mask, not yet old, despite the small brushstrokes of white at the temples. You might think that gravity alone was tugging at its mouth. But George, the middle-aged professor and single man of the title whom Firth plays with a magnificent depth of feeling, has had his heart broken, and the pieces are still falling.

The film, directed by Tom Ford, follows the outlines of the landmark 1964 novel of the same title by Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), the openly gay British-born author whose story Sally Bowles was turned first into the play I Am a Camera and later the musical and movie Cabaret. An intensely, at times uncomfortably, intimate work of fiction, A Single Man condenses George’s story — much of his very life — into one emotion- and event-charged day. What makes the day special, and the book too, is George’s existential condition. George is single. And he is a man. But he is also a homosexual, which helps set him and his lusting, fading body apart from almost everyone in his life.

But other things distinguish George, including his profound grief over the death of his longtime lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), seen in intermittent flashback. The film opens with an image of George slowly sinking naked in water, a vision suggestive of rebirth and fatal submersion. This is immediately followed by a starkly different image of him slowly entering, as if in a trance, a disquieting tableau in which Jim and a terrier lie dead in a snowy field next to a wrecked automobile and a large, vivid blot of blood. Carefully, George lowers himself next to his dead lover and tenderly kisses his mouth, a gesture that seems to cause George — who had actually been sleeping and presumably dreaming — to wake in his bed.

Numbness follows, as do routine, work, sorrow and perhaps another kind of awakening. Set in 1962 — news of the Cuban missile crisis crackles through the air — the film tracks George from the brutal loneliness of his morning through his day and transformative night. Along the way, he passes in and out of the Los Angeles area college where he teaches Huxley to bored students who stare at him with curiosity when the subject turns to invisible minorities and fear. He crosses paths and wits with a flirty student, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), and a charming hustler, Carlos (Jon Kortajarena), while also making time for his close friend, Charley (Julianne Moore), a British expat like George. At one point, he buys some bullets.

It’s axiomatic, at least for Chekhov and a lot of Hollywood directors, that if you introduce a gun in the first act, it must go off in the third. Ford, who shares screenwriting credit with David Scearce, introduces a gun largely because the novel has so little obvious dramatic tension. The gun is a matter of narrative convenience that sometimes works, if sometimes not, with the bits Ford borrows from Pedro Almodóvar and Wong Kar-wai. Ford, for instance, partly frames George’s encounter with the hustler in front of a billboard for Hitchcock’s Psycho featuring a wild-eyed Janet Leigh, an image that recalls a similar shot in Almodóvar’s All About My Mother and invokes the unsettlingly sexual menace of Psycho.

Bringing Hitchcock and Almodóvar into the picture is risky because it creates a ridiculously lofty level of expectation. O.K., show me, you think. (It also intimates that the director and the audience belong to the same cine club, which can seem like a form of pandering.) But Ford, one of the most famous names in fashion and in luxury branding — he was the longtime creative director of Gucci — has taken an enormous chance just by taking on A Single Man, a foundational text in modern gay literature. The novelist Edmund White, for one, called the book “the first truly liberated gay novel in English.” That kind of legacy would have intimidated a lot of inexperienced directors, but Ford betrays few signs of intimidation.

Firth’s delicately shaded performance no doubt helped steady Ford’s nerves. Certainly, the director knows how to exploit his actor’s reserve to terrific effect, as when he sets the camera in front of Firth’s face in one critical scene and just lets the machine record the tremors of emotion cracking the facade. It’s hard to know if Ford’s most flamboyant visual flourish, the use of a changeable palette to show shifts in George’s mood — the character’s normally gray face floods with color in the presence of another life force, like Kenny — was born out of a filmmaking conceit or a lack of confidence. Whatever the case, while the color changes are initially distracting, Firth’s performance soon makes you forget them.

Ford has excellent taste in lead actors — Goode and Moore are very fine — and in cinematic influences. But he hasn’t fully learned how to work inside the moving image plane, a space in which people and objects must be dynamically engaged rather than prettily arranged, as they occasionally are here. And at times his taste seems too impeccable, art-directed for a maximum sale, as in a black-and-white flashback that brings to mind a perfume advertisement. In a film by Wong, whose influence is evident in the visuals and on the elegiac score, a luxuriant bloom, a curlicue of smoke and the curve of a lover’s back express what the characters themselves cannot, rather than the filmmaker’s own personal style. The composer Shigeru Umebayashi has written music for several of Wong’s films and contributed to this one.

That Ford has placed so much weight on Firth suggests that he knows how valuable his actor is to his first effort. And while A Single Man has its flaws, many of these fade in view of the performance and the power of Isherwood’s story. Part of the radical importance of Isherwood’s novel is its insistence on the absolute ordinariness of George’s life, including with Jim, whose relationship together is pictured only briefly in both the novel and the film, and yet reverberates deeply (then as now). Ford’s single man might be less common than Isherwood’s, a bit too exquisitely dressed. But with Firth, Ford has created a gay man troubled by ordinary grief and haunted by joy, a man apart and yet like any other. Grade: B-plus

Other recent movies to be released tomorrow on DVD:

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2010). Journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and rebellious computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) team up to investigate the unsolved disappearance of wealthy Henrik Vanger's (Sven-Bertil Taube) teen niece, only to uncover dark secrets about Vanger's powerful family. In the mitts of an American director, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo might have become a Bruce Willis thriller or the pilot episode of CSI: Stockholm. But in the nimble hands of Niels Arden Oplev, this Swedish sensation is a magic trick that jolts the murder-mystery genre back to life. Like a filmic Frankenstein, it assembles pieces of other movies into a uniquely frightening whole. The titular heroine is a worthy sister to the tough cookies in La Femme Nikita and Run Lola Run. Her partner in the project is a dogged journalist in the tradition of the ones in The Parallax View and All the President's Men. And the brainy sleuthing and serial-killer subplot are reminiscent of Zodiac and Silence of the Lambs. The duo is set to return for two sequels, and an English-language version is planned by Se7en director David Fincher, because The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo gets under the skin. Grade: B

Brooklyn’s Finest (2010). Antoine Fuqua directs this drama about three wildly different New York cops whose paths collide in a Brooklyn housing project. Cynical, washed-up Eddie (Richard Gere) no longer cares about the job or the rules; cash-strapped Sal (Ethan Hawke) sees a shortcut to solvency; and Tango (Don Cheadle) is torn between conflicting loyalties. This perfectly adequate cop drama would feel awfully derivative even without a cast mostly consisting of the Morally Ambiguous Police-Movie All-Stars. Seemingly half the gritty undercover thrillers of the past 25 years are represented. For those keeping track at home, Finest stars Internal Affairs’ Gere, New Jack City’s Wesley Snipes (playing, of all things, a charismatic, larger-than-life drug dealer), Sea Of Love’s Ellen Barkin, and Traitor’s Cheadle in a film that reunites one of the leads (Hawke) and director (Fuqua) of Training Day. To quote Yogi Berra, it’s déjà vu all over again. From the moment Gere is introduced waking up to whiskey for breakfast, Brooklyn’s Finest segues smoothly and slickly from one cliché to another. When it’s established that Gere is but days away from retirement, the film skirts self-parody; it wouldn’t be out of place for him to grouse that he’s getting too old for this crap. Fuqua stretches 90 minutes’ worth of material to a heavily padded 140, but he’s blessed with a cast far better than the TV-ready script deserves, especially a smolderingly intense Cheadle as a cop rotting away from the inside. Brooklyn’s Finest was one of the big sales at Sundance last year. Movies that score big Sundance paydays tend to be either so great their potential is obvious to everyone, or incredibly commercial genre films. Fuqua’s star-studded Finest fits one of those criteria, and not because it’s a towering masterpiece. Grade: C-plus