This movie, and presumably the novel by Christopher Isherwood from which it was adapted, focuses on a single day in Falconer's life shortly after he is devastated to learn that Jim (Matthew Goode), his lover for the past 16 years, has been killed in a car accident while driving to Colorado to visit his parents. To add insult to the injury of his loss, Jim's family refuses to invite him to the funeral and they even deny him the pleasure of having their dog which had survived the accident. 

George Falconer is a closet homosexual in an era when living openly as a gay man was not an option. This movie closely examines his life and the way he hides at the back of the closet during an era when this activity is not only not permitted, but often prosecuted. In 1962 everyone else was fixating on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and many people were constructing bomb shelters to escape a greatly feared atomic bomb holocaust. Even one of his fellow professors brags about his new bomb shelter. George Falconer instead finds himself locked into his own bomb shelter. For him the fear of being outed is greater than the fear of dying in an atomic blast. 

Life has lost all meaning for George because of Jim's death, but he is forced to mourn in silence. His grief threatens to consume his being, and he has only the sympathy from Charlie (Julianne Moore), another British expatriate, to console him. Even her company turns out to be a mixed blessing since they had once had an affair years earlier back in London before he became exclusively homosexual. Since then George and Charlie have remained close friends, and now they live in the same Los Angeles neighborhood. Charlie still carries faint hopes of converting George back to some semblance of a heterosexual relationship since she is lonely as a well to do widow. 

Charlie's house is one of the few places where George can be himself besides his own contemporary house which Jim, an architect, had designed and built. They had shared this house, but now living there with its many memories does nothing to assuage his grief. Neither do his lectures to a bunch of clueless college students who know little or nothing of great literature and define fear as the looming threat of a Russian missile attack. On top of everything else, he learns that Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), one of his students, has been asking around to find out where he lives.

While there is no doubt as to the compelling nature of Colin Firth's quiet and subtle portrayal of a man lost in grief, I still found this movie to be flawed and very troubling. One annoying feature is that it is being advertised and sold as a buddy movie with Charlie prominently displayed in the advertising when, in fact, her role is relatively minor. 

More importantly, there is not much of a story here. The time frame is a single day and the plot is about as thin. George's role is finely portrayed, but the role is only that of a one dimensional character. We see nothing of George Falconer besides his grief. The very limited plot  does nothing to help us identify with either his character or the story. 

Furthermore, there are more than a few scenes in this film which made me feel very uncomfortable as a heterosexual. No doubt the many scenes of playful homosexual foreplay offended me because they ring true. In addition the scenes involving Nicholas Hoult as a pretty boy student who looks at his middle aged professor with such overt longing creeped me out. I loved Hoult as a child actor years ago for his role in "About a Boy," but here he plays a far less appealing kind of a "boy." (C, skip it, especially if strong homosexual themes offend you.)