In A Single Man, fantasy and reality blend—with more concord than the filmmakers perhaps intended. We’re once again in the An Education period—1962—though, this time, the British protagonist has swum across the pond, and then some, to Santa Monica. George (Colin Firth), a middle-aged professor of English, has only recently become single; his partner of 16 years, Jim (Matthew Goode—the fruity übermensch from Watchmen), has died in a car crash. The bulk of the film is set a few months later—on the day that George has designated as his last.

Until 40ish minutes had crawled by, I wondered if I was being engorged by a glossy fashion magazine; pages’ worth of glittering eyeballs and dishy male forms—slowed down so that the movement of each tendon was perceptible—lapped at me like an unwelcome tongue. Lest one prematurely exclaims “homophobe!,” allow me to qualify: What palled on me was not the movie’s blatant homoeroticism, but its sexualization of everything. If everything’s sexy, then nothing is. When the pigtailed girl next door and a hound that resembles a pet that the couple once owned are given the same erotic charge that the shirtless members of a college tennis team get, the professor’s devotion to true-love-forever seems reduced to a hard-on for anything that crosses his path.

One might assume that the first-time director, Tom Ford—the quondam couturier—is interested less in capturing George’s emotions than he is accolades for artiness. But the direction of A Single Man isn’t flashy—or trashy—the way that it was for, say, Inglourious Basterds. When George makes his suicidal intentions apparent to the audience by cleaning both his pistol and safe-deposit box, the purple haze begins to clear. And when he decides to spend his last night drinking gin and tonics, puffing pink cigarettes, and grooving to Bossa nova with his old chum Charley (Julianne Moore), the movie hits its stride. She’s been waiting—to no avail—for her “poof” to switch teams; they fooled around when he was a free agent. Moore gives a wonderful slinky quality to this “available woman” who drinks too much alcohol and gets drunk on regret—another noxious solution. She brings out something in Firth that nobody else in the cast does: a spiky, peakish irony that usually lies dormant beneath his rigid, academic mask. She asks what his plans are for the weekend; he says it’s going to be quiet.

Firth gives a good, restrained performance; but, sometimes, the Moore, the merrier. In several of his scenes without her, such as those of him on campus, he too easily embodies that ennobling cliché of the rock-hard prig with a soft and gooey core. If it doesn’t belittle his pain, a sense of proportion can be appropriate. So, when straight-faced George labors to pinpoint the most Feng Shui way to blow his brains out, and gets anal about which way his corpse should be discovered, one can relax—things really aren’t as bathetic as George thinks.

To return to my point about the filmmakers’ conflating reality and fantasy—the substantial and the superficial—enter Nicholas Hoult as Kenny: one of George’s, shall we say, more ambitious students. In a lecture, George divagates from Aldous Huxley to the abstract notion of fear—governments use it to keep the populace in line (we’re amid the Cuban Missile Crisis); Madison Avenue to sell its goods; the oppressive majority to cast doubts on harmless, but necessarily invisible, minorities. The queer subtext—aimed smack-dab at Kenny—couldn’t be clearer if Adam Lambert was at the lectern. Kenny the creeper—he seems, to me at least, the kind of pupil whose apples are wormy bribes—has gone to the college administration to suss out his teacher’s address. He buys George a pencil sharpener; invites him to smoke dope; hits up his hole in the wall; cajoles him; and spins his own wheels in “deep” philosophical sludge. Is this kid for real? Or is he just slowly unzipping the professorial pants? It’s hard to tell when he’s made up and posed like a Calvin Klein model; you can practically hear the fan whirr as it tousles his tresses. The masculine ideal was different in the Kennedy era, but isn’t plastic pretty-boy Kenny the twerpy, epicene idol that Madison Avenue sells today? I thought George dreamed deeper—unless he’s lying to himself. Hoult accurately suggests an undergrad leech, but he doesn’t—and not merely by virtue of his flossy appearance—suggest worldly-wise depth, even in embryo.

Mostly, though, Ford has neatly applied his sartorial gifts to the screen. Ford uses aural-visual distortions where other directors might insert voice-over; he dramatizes moods where others dramatize action. (If the camera wasn’t plugged into George’s hopeless-romantic noggin, A Single Man would be nearly incomprehensible.) The period setting is deliciously rendered by Ford and Eduard Grau, the cinematographer. What George saw as superficial we now see as idealistically sleek. The heroine of An Education wanted to escape the coat of grime Old London was encased in; George and Charley have traded that grime for smog, but their brand-spanking-new L.A. is a dreamworld—a monument to postwar prosperity. All the lines in the architecture intersect at exacting right angles: perfect and soulless, all at once.

Well then. Is it un-P.C. to say that A Single Man looks fabulous? Too bad; I’ve said it. But when you make a movie about homosexual lovers, and set it before the Stonewall riots, you must be conscious of more than the production design. Ford and David Scearce adapted the screenplay from a 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood—progenitor of the bi-curious Cabaret—and that the director doesn’t go overboard interlarding the period with revisionist attitudes is not only a blessing for those of us who yawn through polemicals; it’s also quite progressive. Whereas Milk—a decent, all too relevant film that was nonetheless descended from a primeval gene pool of socially conscious filmmaking—explained why one should accept gay people, A Single Man largely skirts the issue. It deals with gay rights peripherally; it’s part of the texture—for us to observe. The movie doesn’t flatter the audience by using the present to batter bigots from the past; the picture has nothing to prove. George’s suffering is more eloquent than a pamphlet’s-worth of talking points. It’s a given that we’ll feel for him, regardless of his sexual orientation. And, in cases like this, a given is more powerful than a lesson—and certainly more interesting.