Like "Seven Pounds," the sensationally sentimental Will Smith vehicle of last year, "A Single Man" confronts the unusual subject of an individual's careful preparations for his suicide. Unlike the earlier movie, however, the new film concentrates on one day, the last in the life of its protagonist, George Falconer (Colin Firth), a British expatriate who teaches English at a university in Southern California.

Grieving over the death of his partner, Jim (Matthew Goode), Falconer calmly follows his daily routine, teaching a class on the modern English novel, clearing out his office, arranging his will and insurance policies, even setting out the suit in which he will be buried. The director, Tom Ford, interrupts the essentially humdrum nature of such an enterprise with flashbacks to various episodes in the relationship between the two men, from their first encounter through their apparently happy domestic life, which lasted 16 years until Jim died in an automobile accident, far from their home. Jim's family will not even allow George the opportunity to attend the funeral, which in his case means he suffers his loss alone, a sadly single man indeed.

The movie takes place in the fall of 1962, against the background of the Cuban missile crisis, which allows Ford to showcase a great deal of period material, from the paranoia of the Cold War, to the time's necessary repression of a man's homosexuality, to the exuberant tailfins of the last great era of American automotive design. In a most unimpressive lecture that the director clearly believes dazzles the professor's class, Falconer touches on the notion of fear, not only the fear of war, but the fear of speaking out, and implicitly, the fear of acknowledging one's sexual orientation. The lecture so impresses Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), a worshipful, doe-eyed undergraduate, that he engages Falconer in some intense conversation, seeks him out at his home, and spends a last, chaste night with him.

Despite Falconer's perfectly understandable sorrow and the film's genuinely touching emotional basis, "A Single Man" proceeds through that final day with a ferocious dullness and a good deal of slick fakery in compensation for the static nature of the narrative. The director's background in fashion accounts for the constantly changing appearance of the images - the bright California sunlight that exaggerates the palette in many scenes, the great variety of filters and focuses for the several flashbacks, which sometimes resemble grainy 16mm film or even faded videotape, and sometimes the dreamy softness that some filmmakers use to represent memory. One scene, shot in black and white, looks so much like an illustration for a Calvin Klein ad that it subverts its own attempt at serious affect.

George Falconer fits all too well into the Hollywood stereotype of the college professor. His office looks like the roomy, antiseptic quarters of a mid-level corporate executive; he lives in a terrific California house, all glass, stone, and wood, though without the books one would expect; and he drives a nifty Mercedes sports car. (Those West Coast schools must pay their faculty a lot more than the ones I know).

As some directors shoot action scenes close to the camera to provide a sense of rapid, confused movement, Tom Ford depends heavily on innumerable cruel close-ups of actors' faces to convey emotion. He shoots Firth and a gaudy, sexy, boozy, and over-the-top Julianne Moore, who plays his friend and fellow expatriate Charley, so tightly that now and then his camera barely avoids probing their nostrils and examining their tonsils. The approach actually diminishes their credibility as the audience ultimately comes to know them all too well and in the wrong ways.

Colin Firth deserves at least a modicum of credit for virtually carrying the whole movie on his back. With commendable restraint and a relentlessly minimalist approach to his character, he conveys a considerable depth of emotion and even some flashes of wit in the midst of the director's constantly overstated melancholy. On the other hand, all that British restraint and repression sometimes descends into a self-pitying passivity that grows increasingly tedious as the movie advances sedately and ultimately unconvincingly through its small, constricted space.