Review of Albert Nobbs (2011) by Edith N — 18 Dec 2011

The Eyes Are Doing All the Acting.

Preparatory to writing this review, I went and looked up Glenn Close's Oscar record. She has been nominated five times--three for Supporting. The first year, 1982, she was up against Leslie Ann Warren in [i]Victor/Victoria[/i]. They both lost to Jessica Lange in [i]Tootsie[/i]. (It's worth noting that the people who actually crossdressed in those movies themselves both lost, Julie Andrews to Meryl Streep in [i]Sophie's Choice[/i] and Dustin Hoffman to Sir Ben Kingsley in [i]Gandhi[/i].) The next year, Close was up for Supporting Actress again. She lost to Linda Hunt in [i]The Year of Living Dangerously[/i]. Hunt, in my head "the woman who played the Shadout Mapes in [i]Dune[/i]," was the only woman to win an Oscar for playing a male character. The coincidences end there, but I pictured Glenn Close reading this script and thinking, "Oh, for heaven's sake--maybe I'd win this time." Though further investigation shows she first played the role before her first nomination.

Albert Nobbs (Close) is a prim and proper fellow. He works at a hotel in Dublin, and he is saving up every penny in the hopes of saving up enough to buy a shop and go into business as a tobacconist. One day, a room in the hotel is to be painted and Hubert Page (Janet McTeer), the painter, is to share a bed with Mr. Nobbs. Late that night, a flea bites Mr. Nobbs, and he writhes and leaps and strips, seeking the thing. And Hubert wakes up in time to see Albert's breasts. Quite a surprise, as you may imagine, but Hubert reveals the identical secret--and Hubert is married to Cathleen (Bronagh Gallagher). Mr. Nobbs is taken aback by it, but he begins to daydream of perhaps sharing that shop with a wife, in particular the lovely and vibrant young Helen Dawes (Mia Wasikowska). Mr. Nobbs asks to walk out with her, but she is sleeping with handsome-but-feckless Joe Macken (Aaron Johnson). Joe decides that Helen should get all the money she can out of Mr. Nobbs, and it will pay their trip to America.

Yes, I refer to both Albert Nobbs and Hubert Page as "he." This is polite, so far as I am concerned--except for one exceedingly awkward scene, both spend the entire movie dressed as men. Both spend almost the entire movie acting as men. Indeed, that one scene rather proves that neither quite know how to be women anymore--Mr. Nobbs, as I cannot help thinking of him, never even tells us his birth name. When asked his real name, he replies, "Albert." And after thirty years as Albert, well. When he considers marrying Helen, he worries about how he's going to tell her and when, never considering that maybe it's a deal-breaker, that Helen would have no interest in marrying a man even leaving aside Joe. Something very bad happened to the woman who would become Albert Nobbs, and if she stopped being a woman, that would never happen to her again. Which is true enough.

This is perhaps the first role I have seen Mia Wasikowska in where she does not play an entirely sympathetic character. She knows that she has no interest in marrying the peculiar Mr. Nobbs. She even very politely turns him down when first he asks her to go out walking with him, because she is, after all, seeing Joe. Quite a lot of Joe. But Joe says, well, see what you can get out of him, and until Helen realizes quite the extent to which Joe wants her to get things out of Mr. Nobbs, she's okay with that. As long as it's merely boxes of chocolates or stockings. She is disgusted by how tight with a penny Mr. Nobbs is, not working out that it's why he has as much to spend as he does when he chooses to spend. It does mean that she has the sense to know that Mr. Nobbs will not be financing her trip to America any time soon. At that, Mr. Nobbs doesn't believe that Joe will ever take her to America and doesn't understand why she isn't just as happy with the perfectly good offer of being a tobacconist's wife.

For the record, while I was not particularly fooled by Janet McTeer when Hubert Page first appears onscreen, I'm wondering how much of that was an expectation based around knowing that Albert Nobbs was female. And when I first saw the trailer, I didn't realize he was. It wasn't merely that I didn't recognize Glenn Close, though I didn't. It's that I was running through actors in my head, trying to place why the fellow looked so familiar. What's more, I'm probably harder to fool than the people of that era would have been, because I know that there are men who dress as women and vice versa. One of my favourite comedians is a transvestite. One of my sister's best friends is a transsexual. I know these things exist. For heaven's sake, I saw [i]The Crying Game[/i] in the theatre! How many people a hundred and fifty years ago would even consider the possibility that the wiry fellow who is smoking, swearing, and flirting with the maids was a woman? And if you don't consider the possibility, you're much more likely to ignore any evidence presented until it's evidence you can't ignore.