Glenn Close is.... Albert Nobbs....

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/albert-nobbs-edelstein-2012-1/


Costume Drama
In Albert Nobbs, Glenn Close
becomes fear personified.

By David Edelstein
Published Jan 22, 2012

A s the title character in Albert Nobbs,  a woman impersonating a man in late-nineteenth-century Dublin, Glenn Close has cropped, orangey hair and a voice that rarely rises above a croak. Outdoors, she’s painfully ill at ease in an overlarge, three-piece black suit and a bowler hat. Inside the high-toned hotel and restaurant in which she lives and works as a waiter, she behaves with robotic obeisance, her lips pressed together, her searching eyes her only naturally moving parts. The performance is extraordinary, literally: Close resembles no man I’ve ever seen, or woman either. She’s the personification of fear—the fear of being seen through, seen for what she is.
 
This hushed, almost unbearably sad film is based on a story by George Moore published in 1918, long after its events had supposedly taken place. By then, readers could look back on poor Nobbs as a martyr to a more benighted view of women, and see the story’s other major character, Hubert Page—a woman who leaves her husband and children and becomes a (male) housepainter—as a kind of working-class version of Ibsen’s Nora. Close played Nobbs in a theatrical adaptation in the early eighties, just before her star-making appearance as a militant feminist in The World According to Garp,  and has been working for the past two decades to repeat the role onscreen. The script she co-wrote with John Banville and Gabriella Prekop adds some melodramatic flourishes but sticks to Moore’s masochistic trajectory. Inspired by Hubert Page (Janet McTeer), who lives a cozy, blissful domestic existence with a dressmaker “wife” (Bronagh Gallagher), Albert dreams of opening a tobacco shop with a pert blonde housemaid, Helen (Mia Wasikowska), who’s already stepping out with the handsome boiler man (Aaron Johnson). Helen sees “Mr. Nobbs” as a ludicrous suitor but a potential source of money to escape with her man to America. Albert sees Helen as sweet salvation.

Is Albert Nobbs  a “gay” film? I don’t think Eros enters into the equation. It’s more a matter of Albert and Hubert’s finding somewhere safe in a society that treats all poor people badly but poor women worse.

The director, Rodrigo García, helped Close give a buoyant, tender performance (her least histrionic) in the final segment of his omnibus film Nine Lives,  and in Albert Nobbs he combines his gift for creating intimacy (he directed many episodes of In Treatment,  as well as the wrenching Mother and Child ) with a new attention to wide-screen bustle. The movie has no tight close-ups: Even in isolation, Albert is surrounded by people—chief among them the hotel’s mingy-minded mistress (the superb Pauline Collins)—who’d toss her into the street with the rest of the unemployed if they knew her secret. (The exception, Brendan Gleeson as a kind, drunken doctor who might have stepped out of a Chekhov play, has no idea who she is until it’s too late.) There is nowhere for Albert to be “herself,” if such a thing exists anymore. Even in her bed, she’s gnawed by fleas.

Close is very fine, at once tight and tremulous, but it’s a pity that it took so long for her and Albert to reunite. She was in her early thirties when she played the part onstage, a good age for Nobbs, who’d by then have spent two decades under wraps but could still look forward to a few decades more—and a whole new life. Thirty years on (Close is 64), her Albert is a hunched, wizened thing, a few years (if that) from being “a little old man.” It is not so much her sex as her seniority that makes her an inconceivable match for the girlish Helen, and so a fantasy that might have seemed unlikely but appealing is now obviously, thunderously delusional. At 50, McTeer is closer to seeming neither young nor old, male nor (in spite of her sprawling bosom, which she bares) female. She gives a marvelous performance, lightly ironic but above all easy, impishly at home in her present incarnation. Perhaps it’s her resemblance to Rachel Maddow that makes me see her as the movie’s beacon of potency. She looks as if she could set the whole country straight.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2012/01/albert_nobbs_glenn_close_plays_a_woman_playing_a_man_.html


What a Drag
There’s much to admire but little to love in Albert Nobbs.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Friday, Jan. 27, 2012, at 6:20 PM ET


Glenn Close and Mia Wasikowska in Albert Nobbs.


Albert Nobbs (Glenn Close), the diminutive protagonist of Rodrigo Garcia’s film of the same name, works as a waiter in a posh hotel in late 19th-century Dublin. He speaks little and, when he does, reveals still less. Outside of a cordial master/servant relationship with Dr. Holloran (Brendan Gleeson), a hard-drinking physician in residence at the hotel, the passive, blank-faced Nobbs seems to have no friendships at all. As he prepares for bed one night in his tiny, drab bedchamber, we learn the truth about this cipher of a man: Albert is in fact a woman who’s been passing as male since her hardscrabble teenage years in order to find work and avoid harassment at the hands of men.

Of course, Albert Nobbs’ true gender was never a secret to us, since the novelty of Glenn Close’s drag turn has played a key role in the movie’s advance marketing, and has now helped to garner both Close and her co-star Janet McTeer Oscar nominations. That’s not to say that Close and McTeer are undeserving; both women give outstanding performances (albeit in two completely different styles—more on that later.) But cross-dressing roles, however well-performed, do have a built-in Oscar appeal. They’re by definition big performances, even if the character in question is (like Albert Nobbs) a small, unobtrusive person.

The trick Close has to pull off here is all the more difficult given the closed-off nature of her character: She not only has to play a woman pretending to be a man, but to play a person who’s constantly pretending, who seems to have no idea, after so many years in hiding, what it would mean to live as a woman or a man. What, if anything, Albert desires, sexually or otherwise, we never really find out. Albert Nobbs is the portrait of a person with an inner life so inaccessible that even he or she no longer knows what’s going on in there. (I don’t even know whether to use the masculine or feminine pronoun in writing about the character; I’m choosing to go with “him,” if only because it seems like the hyper-discreet Albert would have wanted it that way.)

Albert does at one point try to court Helen Dawes (Mia Wasikowska), a much-younger hotel employee who’s more interested in her handsome, abusive boyfriend (Aaron Johnson). But it’s plain that Albert desires Helen more for the sake of companionship and respectability than for anything physical. Albert longs to get out of the personal-servant business, open his own tobacco shop and find himself a little missus; he hasn’t quite worked out when, how, or whether to tell said missus his lifelong secret.

Albert’s sudden commitment to settling down is inspired by his acquaintance with Hubert Page (McTeer), a workman who comes to the hotel to make some repairs and is forced by circumstance to spend one night in Albert’s bed. Hubert gets a glimpse of his roommate’s partially clothed body, and the jig is up—or not quite, as Hubert has a secret of his, or rather her, own to reveal the next day.

Outing Hubert as a woman couldn’t be said to constitute a spoiler even if the media hadn’t already briefed audiences on the movie’s paired cross-dressing performances: The reveal happens early on and is instrumental in setting the major storylines in motion. Hubert, unlike Albert, is no repressed cipher. She’s big, bold, and confident in her body, as we learn when she casually discloses her secret by flashing Albert a spectacular pair of breasts in what’s by far the movie’s funniest and sexiest moment. Hubert is legally married to a seamstress named Cathleen (Bronagh Gallagher in a small but memorable part), and they have a warm, happy life together—a revelation that leaves Albert first perplexed, then envious.

This film has been a passion project for Close since she played the lead in the 1982 Off-Broadway play The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs   (itself an adaptation of an Irish short story)—she co-wrote the script and also produced.  But her performance, while technically accomplished in every way (the Irish accent, the ramrod posture, the fey mannerisms) has a studied, fussed-over air about it. It isn’t just that the character she’s playing is laced so tightly; it’s that Close as an actress never seems to relax and disappear into the role. It’s an admirable performance but a difficult one to love.

Maybe the problem is also that, as a character, the needy, ingratiating Albert never really warms the viewer’s heart as much as he seems meant to. There’s something calculated, even maudlin, about the way Albert’s silent, wounded gaze plays on the viewer’s sympathies—it would be easier to root for him if he had more of an edge. McTeer, on the other hand, seems to be having a rip-roaring time stomping around as Hubert. The character as written may be a bit absurd—a kind of Magic Butch Lesbian who liberates everyone she meets from their sexual and economic shackles—but McTeer plays her with such wit and gusto you can’t wait till she breezes into view.

A couple of unlikely third-act denouements resolve all the major plotlines with bewildering haste, but though the end left me asking, “Wait, that’s it?,” I wasn’t too sorry the film was over. Albert Nobbs  is the rare double drag king bill you could plausibly take your grandmother to. It’s genteel, well-crafted, mostly sexless and frequently dull—a movie that, like its title character, never quite dares to let itself discover what it really wants to be.

[southendmd]

Has anyone else seen it yet?  I did, yesterday. 

**possible spoilers**




I tried not to read most of the above reviews and such, wanting to see the film "fresh". 

Glenn Close's performance is what I would call "admirable" rather than great.  I know she had a hand in the script, and therein lies the fault, I'm afraid.  There's very little back story to explain her situation, the age thing was a little jarring, and the ending too facile.   

Janet McTeer steals the film, in my opinion.  All the articles on the film give away her character's secret--because it happens early in the film, a piss-poor excuse, and it's too bad.  We should be as surprised as Albert is. 

In an otherwise very serious film, there is one very funny moment.  It could have been simply ridiculous, but becomes poignant, if also heavy handed. 

Aaron Johnson is lovely, all rawness and ambition.  I too had seen him in "Nowhere Boy" as the young John Lennon.  I see that he is to play the Count in "Anna Karenina", out this year. 

Pauline Collins is a sentimental favorite, as I remember her from the Brit TV comedy "No, Honestly" from the 70s. 

I'm undecided about Mia Wasikowska as an actress.