That's how director Teplitzky created a jerk like a protagonist. But then the director let us see Tom's transformation. He recalls his beloved wife, and his penchant for curly wig-wearing prostitutes, from different segment scenes.
Director Teplitzky said publicly that "The Man in the Fire" was inspired by personal experience, and his unique style of filming is reflected in abandoning the usual flat and straightforward way of filming, not taking the path of sadness, and recording how a happy family would have been Fragmented by the death of wife/mother. Teplitzky does not arrange meaningful silences and emotional entanglements in the film, but instead uses frenzied energy and constantly changing scenes to express loss and reminiscence, as well as the catharsis of depression.
Tom, played by Matthew Goode, is withdrawn and indifferent, sleeping with a fixed type of woman, falling in love with a willful and stubborn woman, full of foul-mouthed words. His grief was raw, his anger was palpable. The role also fits logically into a role Matthew Goode has played in the past, the gay man who played the leading man in Tom Ford's equally brilliant bereavement film "The Single Man," who was killed in a car accident. As a result, it often appears in scenes that flash back and forth in the film.
