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

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Aloysius J. Gleek:


http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/albert-nobbs-telluride-film-review-231005



Telluride Film Review:
Albert Nobbs
12:17 PM PDT 9/3/2011 by Todd McCarthy


Glenn Close, who co-produced and co-wrote the Rodrigo Garcia-helmed project, stars as a woman
who dresses as a man in order to make a living in late 19th century Ireland.


The curious tale of a woman passing herself off as a man in late Victorian–era Dublin, Albert Nobbs generates a degree of engagement by virtue of its sheer oddness and the carefully calibrated performances of Glenn Close and Janet McTeer. But Rodrigo Garcia’s film only intermittently surmounts the limitations of the central character’s parched emotional existence and restricted horizons, and the resolutions to some principal dramatic lines seem rather too easy. Liddell Entertainment and Roadside Attractions will be able to draw considerable attention to this longtime dream project of actor, co-producer and co-screenwriter Close, but the odds seem against its breaking through beyond specialized venues to connect with a general public.

Based on 19th century Irish writer George Moore’s short story The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs,  this incarnation of the tale has its origins in a spare stage piece created by the late Simone Benmussa that was first seen in France and was then done in London in 1978 with Susannah York in the title role. Close starred in a 1982 New York production and has ever since tried to mount a screen version and came close about a decade ago with Istvan Szabo, which accounts for the Hungarian director’s story credit on the present film.
 
Threatening to become known as the modern George Cukor for his consistent skill in eliciting superb performances from actresses, Garcia only adds to his reputation here.  Almost never seen in anything but the professional wardrobe of servant at the elegant Morrison’s Hotel, the Albert Nobbs known to fellow workers and the fancy clientele is a fastidious, polite, impeccably correct gentleman who says little and, off-hours, keeps to himself in a drab upstairs room where, unbeknownst to anyone, he keeps his earnings under the floorboards.

When the proprietress Mrs. Baker (Pauline Collins) informs Nobbs that he’ll need to share his room (and bed) for a night with a painter doing some touch-ups at the hotel, Nobbs invents every excuse as to why this is impossible. But before morning, Nobbs’ secret it out and the panicked woman, whose any chance at a livelihood in impoverished 1898 Ireland will be ruined if her secret is revealed, implores the stranger not to blow her cover.
 
It isn’t long, however, before the painter, Hubert Page, exposes to Nobbs a secret of his own: He’s actually a she as well. This happens so early that it can’t legitimately be considered a spoiler –it’s no The Crying Game --and there’s no way the remainder of the story can be discussed without knowledge of the twin disguises. The revelation scene is an eye-popper, with this tall, rangy individual, who’s always dressed in bulky jackets and sweaters and has a self-rolled cigarette perennially dangling from mouth’s corner, suddenly flashing Nobbs with the sight of two mountainous breasts.

The complicity of these two cross-dressers provides what drive the narrative possesses. A much more easy-going personality than the terminally repressed Nobbs, “Hubert” not only passes as a man but is married to a woman (the wonderful Bronagh Gallagher). One of the story’s dissatisfactions is that Nobbs’ curiosity over how this came about—did her friend reveal the truth before or after the wedding?—is never answered, an issue which bears on dreams that Nobbs , inspired by Hubert, now dares to entertain.
 
With the money she’s saved, Nobbs sets her sights on opening a tobacconist’s shop. But for legitimacy’s sake she determines to marry the most attractive member of the hotel service staff, Helen (Mia Wasikowska), a flirty young thing passionately involved with Joe (Aaron Johnson), a dashing but troubled lad set on taking her to America.




* * * * * * * * * * *

S  P  O  I  L  E  R  S
After the relatively dry but passably involving initial stretch, this is where the script, written by Gabriella Prekop, John Banville and Close, begins running aground. Bedding down with Joe one moment, Helen deigns to take outings with Nobbs the next, inducing her to spend hard-earned cash on lavish gifts. Helen’s leading Nobbs on makes little sense unless Helen and Joe are planning to rob Nobbs to finance their voyage, and the whole courtship charade feels wrong for multiple reasons; Nobbs knows Helen is already with Joe and, more to the point, it reveals the ultimate narrowness of Nobbs as a character. This is someone without an inner life or emotions other than the perpetuation of the façade she has created. A brief passage allows her to sketch in how she came to such a station in life, but any sense of blood and feelings coursing through her being is missing, leaving Nobbs lacking in multiple human dimensions. The denouement also takes a convenient way out rather than truly grappling with key central issues.


* * * * * * * * * * *



 
As far as it goes, Close’s characterization is an object of odd fascination; with pale and taut skin, wavy short hair, stiff posture and blank eyes shot through fear, Close entirely expresses the external life of a woman for whom maintaining appearances is truly everything. But unlike the theatrical version, which was a stylized chamber piece, the film cries out for a deeper exploration of this pinched, unrealized human being.

In this regard, Nobbs becomes eclipsed by the Hubert Page character, who has traveled much further down the road to living a full, if still compromised, life. Not only does McTeer have more to play—as a man she seems like a combination of a laconic seafarer and giant street urchin—but she goes at it with real gusto, giving a pulse to the scenes she’s in that is largely absent elsewhere, even though such fine actors as Collins and, as a resident alcoholic doctor, Brendan Gleeson do offer spirited support.  Wasikowska is, as always, a welcome presence, but even she has trouble legitimizing the behavior of her character in the late-going.
 
The opulent but intimate hotel has been warmly and immaclately  realized by production designer Patrizia Von Brandenstein and Pierre-Yves Gayraud’s costumes also play a key role in helping define the characters, all captured handsomely by Michael McDonough’s camerawork.

 
Venue: Telluride Film Festival

Opens:  December (Liddell Entertainment and Roadside Attractions)
Production: Trillium, Mockingbird Pictures, Parallel Films Productions
Sales: WestEnd Films

Cast: Glenn Close, Mia Wasikowska, Aaron Johnson, Janet McTeer, Pauline Collins, Brenda Fricker, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Brendan Gleeson, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Antonia Campbell Hughes, Mark Williams, James Green, Bronagh Gallagher, John Light
Director: Rodrigo Garcia

Screenwriters: Gabriella Prekop, John Banville, Glenn Close, based on a novella by George Moore, story by Istvan Szabo
Producers: Glenn Close, Bonnie Curtis, Julie Lynn, Alan Moloney
Executive Producers: Cami Goff, John C. Goff, Sharon Harel-Cohen, Daryl Roth, David E. Shaw
Director of Photography: Michael McDonough

Production Designer: Patrizia Von Brandenstein
Costume Designer: Pierre-Yves Gayrand
Special Make-ups Designer: Matthew W. Mungle

Editor: Steven Weisberg
Music: Brian Byrne

103 minutes

Aloysius J. Gleek:





Close and McTeer




Johnson and Close

Sophia:
all these readings about Albert Hobbs, made me start to think about this lady




 

 

Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (18 March 1928 - 30 April 2002) was the founder of the Gründerzeit Museum (a museum of everyday items) in Berlin-Mahlsdorf.
 
 
Von Mahlsdorf was born Lothar Berfelde, the son of Max Berfelde and Gretchen Gaupp in Berlin-Mahlsdorf, Germany. At a very young age she felt more like a girl, and expressed more interest in the clothing and articles of little girls. In her younger years she helped a second-hand goods dealer clear out the apartments of deported Jews and sometimes kept items for herself.
 
Max Berfelde, Lothar's father, was already a member of the Nazi Party by the late 1920s and he had become a party leader in Mahlsdorf. In 1942 he forced Lothar to join the Hitler Youth. They often quarrelled, but the situation escalated in 1944 when Lothar's mother left the family during the evacuation. Max demanded Lothar choose between her parents and threatened her with a gun. Shaken by this, Lothar struck her father dead with a rolling pin while he slept. In January 1945, after several weeks in a psychiatric institution, Lothar was sentenced by a court in Berlin to four years detention as an anti-social juvenile delinquent.
 
[edit] Career
 
With the fall of the Third Reich, Lothar was released. She worked as a second-hand goods dealer and dressed in a more feminine way. "Lothar" became "Lottchen". She loved older men and became a well-known figure in the city as von Mahlsdorf. She began collecting household items, thus saving historical every-day items from bombed-out houses. She was also able to take advantage of the clearance of the households of people who left for West Germany.
 
Her collection evolved into the Gründerzeit Museum. She had become engaged in the preservation of the von Mahlsdorf estate, which was threatened with demolition, and was awarded the manor house rent-free. In 1960, Von Mahlsdorf opened the museum of everyday articles from the Gründerzeit (the time of the founding of the German Empire) in the only partially reconstructed Mahlsdorf manor house. The museum became well known in cinematic, artistic and gay circles. From 1970 on, the East Berlin homosexual scene often had meetings and celebrations in the museum.
 
In 1974 the East German authorities announced that they wanted to bring the museum and its exhibits under state control. In protest von Mahlsdorf began giving away the exhibits to visitors. Thanks to the committed involvement of the actress Annekathrin Bürger and the attorney Friedrich Karl Kaul (and possibly also thanks to her enlistment as an inoffizieller Mitarbeiter or Stasi collaborator) the authorities' attempt was stopped in 1976 and she was able to keep the museum.
 
In 1991 neo-Nazis attacked one of her celebrations in the museum. Several participants were hurt. At this time von Mahlsdorf announced she was considering leaving Germany. In 1992 she received the Bundesverdienstkreuz. Her decision to leave Germany meant that she guided her last visitor through the museum in 1995 and in 1997 she moved to Porla Brunn, an old spa near Hasselfors, Sweden, where she opened (with moderate success) a new museum dedicated to the turn of the 19th century. The city of Berlin bought the Gründerzeit Museum, and by 1997 it had been opened again by the "Förderverein Gutshaus Mahlsdorf e. V.".
 
Von Mahlsdorf died from heart failure during a visit to Berlin on 30 April 2002.
 
[edit] Doubtful past
 
In the 1990s questions arose about von Mahlsdorf's past. It became clear that her autobiography contained several contradictions, during both the Nazi period and the GDR period.
 
The accusation was made that her collection was largely the result of the breaking up of the households of Jews deported during the Third Reich and had grown in size from the breaking up of the households of those who had fled East Germany.
 
Moreover, she had supposedly become an Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter of the Stasi on principle on November 17, 1971 and had allegedly supplied information under the code name "Park" until 1976.
 
Independently of this some people accused her of valuing the bourgeois lifestyle and dissociating herself from East Germany after the Wende, calling it a "rotes KZ" (a red concentration camp) and declaring Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski worse than Hermann Göring.
 
Biologically and economically questionable comments such as "Daß die Lesben und Schwulen keine Kinder kriegen, das ist doch ganz natürlich. Die Natur sucht sich ja auch aus, was sie gebrauchen kann, was sie sich vermehren läßt und was nicht. Und wenn wir’s mal so nehmen: Wenn die Lesben und Schwulen nun auch noch Kinder kriegen würden, dann hätten wir heute noch viel mehr Arbeitslose" ("That lesbians and gays can't have children is after all quite natural. Nature too seeks out what it can use, what can reproduce and what can't. If we look at it like that, if lesbians and gays did have children, then we'd have a lot more unemployed people today") - a remark made during a lecture on March 12, 1997 in Berlin [1] - meant that she lost friends within the gay scene as well.
 
[edit] Legacy
 
Regardless of these issues, some people still honour her memory, be it for her work as the founder of the Gründerzeit Museum, or for her public role as a transvestite and her foregrounding of the persecution of homosexuals in both the Third Reich and East Germany. The appeal for a memorial to von Mahlsdorf, organized by the "Förderverein Gutshaus Mahlsdorf e. V." and the "Interessengemeinschaft Historische Friedhöfe Berlin" was therefore a success.
 
The intention of the organizers was to erect a memorial with the inscription "Ich bin meine eigene Frau (I am my own wife) - Charlotte von Mahlsdorf - 18. März 1928 - 30. April 2002" on the first anniversary of Charlotte's death. However, von Mahlsdorf's relatives demanded the inscription be changed. As questions remained about the disposition of her estate, and the "Förderverein Gutshaus Mahlsdorf e. V." was concerned that her relatives could demand the return of her furniture, they yielded to these demands.
 
Although Charlotte von Mahlsdorf had been known almost exclusively by her "stage name" in recent years, her relatives pushed through the inscription "Lothar Berfelde, 1928 - 2002, genannt Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. Dem Museumsgründer zur Erinnerung" (Lothar Berfelde, 1928 - 2002, known as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. In memory of the (male) founder of the museum).
 
[edit] Ich bin meine eigene Frau
 
In 1992 German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim made a film about von Mahlsdorf called Ich bin meine eigene Frau. von Mahlsdorf appears in the film.
 
[edit] I Am My Own Wife
 
Main article: I Am My Own Wife
 
American playwright Doug Wright wrote the character play, I Am My Own Wife based on von Mahlsdorf's life from his own research of her biography. Since its initial run on- and off-Broadway the play has garnered every major theatre award including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony Award, the Drama Desk Award, Drama League Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Lambda Literary Award for Drama.
 
Because the English translation of the German word Frau can be translated as "wife", or "woman", the title can be interpreted as either "I am my own woman", or "I am my own wife". Though the latter translation used by Wright more closely correlates to the word Ehefrau, the phrase, "Ich bin meine eigene Frau" is von Mahlsdorf's answer to her mother's question, "Don't you think it's time to get married?"
 
German author Peter Süß, co-author and publisher of von Mahlsdorf's book, has made another play called "Ich bin meine eigene Frau". The play had its premiere in spring 2006 at the Schauspiel Leipzig.

Aloysius J. Gleek:


http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/movies/albert-nobbs-movie-review.html?adxnnl=1&src=dayp&adxnnlx=1324420284-zMH+sAPPNokHdflnha9N9w



Movie Review
Albert Nobbs
Finding a Safe Harbor in Male Identity
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: December 20, 2011


Glenn Close, left, as Albert Nobbs, and Mia Wasikowska as Helen, a flirtatious maid who
becomes the object of Albert’s wooing.


“Such a sweet little man,” remarks a guest at a shabby-genteel Dublin hotel, referring to a waiter named Albert Nobbs. One of Albert’s co-workers describes him, less kindly, as a “freak,” and there is certainly something odd about this elfin, diffident, ginger-haired fellow, who attends to his duties with fastidious care. He is not, indeed, a fellow at all, but a woman who has lived most of her life disguised as a man. And not just any woman: this self-effacing, cautious character, whose name is also the title of Rodrigo Garcia’s lively and touching new film, is played by the dazzling and infinitely resourceful Glenn Close.

Ms. Close does not exactly suppress her natural radiance to play Albert, whose practice is to hover half-invisibly at the edges of things, inscrutably observing the boisterous doings of the rest of humanity. Rather, she imparts a mysterious glow to his smallest gestures and actions, balancing nimbly on the line between comedy and pathos. On the streets of Dublin, wearing a bowler hat and a dark coat, wielding a rolled-up umbrella, Albert is a Chaplinesque figure. He walks stiffly and speaks in a low monotone, acting out a parody of masculinity that is charming, revealing and sad.

It is also effective enough to fool everyone at the hotel, a humming establishment run by Mrs. Baker, a shrewd and pretentious lady played with cooing, squawking relish by Pauline Collins. The film, based on a short story by George Moore and adapted by Ms. Close, Gabriella Prekop and the Irish novelist John Banville, entangles its protagonist in a skein of subplots, using minor characters to sketch a busy tableau of late-19th-century Ireland.

It is a place constrained by custom and defined by class hierarchy. A group of young aristocrats (led by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) floats in and out of the hotel. Most of the drama — and the comedy — takes place among the hotel workers, who include the “Harry Potter” stalwarts Brendan Gleeson (as the house doctor) and Mark Williams (as one of Albert’s fellow servers). A rough, handsome former militant named Joe (Aaron Johnson) is hired to fix the boiler and starts up an affair with Helen (Mia Wasikowska), a flirtatious maid who also becomes the object of Albert’s wooing.

Albert dares to approach Helen — asking her to “walk out” with him in the city’s parks and shopping districts — because he has encountered a kindred soul in the person of Hubert Page, a housepainter engaged by Mrs. Baker to do some sprucing up. It turns out that Hubert (Janet McTeer) is also a woman in disguise, and he becomes Albert’s mentor and model. Both of them decided to live as men to escape male violence, but they inhabit their assumed identities in very different ways. For Albert, maleness is a way of disappearing in public, a protective cloak of anonymity that guarantees safety. For Hubert, being a man is a form of self-assertion. Tall and loose-limbed, a smoker and a talker, Hubert is happy to partake of the privileges of his adopted gender, including the company of a lovely and devoted wife (Bronagh Gallagher).

“Did he tell her he was a woman before the wedding, or after?” Albert wonders about this arrangement, believing, mistakenly, that it is more of a business deal than a romantic bond. His pursuit of Helen follows along this cautious, practical track: He is saving his tips and wages in the hopes of opening a tobacco shop, and he imagines that a wife could supply him with labor and legitimacy as well as company.

Nothing is that simple, and “Albert Nobbs” explores the complications with a light and sensitive touch. Ms. McTeer’s sly, exuberant performance is a pure delight, and the counterpoint between her physical expressiveness and Ms. Close’s tightly coiled reserve is a marvel to behold. The rest of the film is a bit too decorous and tidy to count as a major revelation, but it dispenses satisfying doses of humor, pathos and surprise.

Ms. Close, who played Albert Nobbs on stage in New York almost 30 years ago, has been trying for many years to bring his story to the screen. She found an ideal director in Mr. Garcia, notable for his sympathetic view of women — as seen in “Nine Lives” and “Mother and Child” — and his ability to keep melodrama within the bounds of good taste. This last quality may count as a limitation, because it is possible to imagine a wilder, campier, more radical rendering of “Albert Nobbs.” (The Pedro Almodóvar version, for example, might be interesting).

But the sincere, sober, careful version we have is good enough, and it is in keeping with the way Ms. Close interprets the character, as a person for whom tact, formality and decency represent not the denial of feeling but its most profound and authentic expression.

“Albert Nobbs” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Sex and violence, more implied than shown.

brianr:
I note this movie has not yet been released in the USA so therefore it is unusual for me to see it before others on the list. I am in Sydney with family (do not know when it will be shown in NZ). We just wanted to fill in time on New Years Eve and the newspaper compared it with Downton Abbey so I thought it might be worth seeing and also Glenn Close was an attraction.  Perhaps just as well I knew nothing more or I might not have chosen it. It is very different from Downton Abbey.
Thought provoking, a bit slow in parts, Glenn Close is excellent. I can see why many say the ending was unsatisfactory but I cannot see how any other ending would have been realistic unless the movie went for another 30 minutes. My sister said it was very sad which was her only comment about Brokeback  :)

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