Mia Wasikowska and Glenn Close promenade in Albert Nobbs
* * 1/2 Albert Nobbs. Written by Glenn Close, John Banville & Gabriella Prekop, based on a short story by George Moore. Directed by Rodrigo Garcia.
Next to The Iron Lady, where Meryl Streep convincingly plays a woman pretending to be a man, this year’s gender-bending honors go to Rodrigo Garcia’s Albert Nobbs. From The Year of Living Dangerously to Tootsie to Boys Don’t Cry, Oscar loves cross-dressing—maybe as much as it loves disabilities. It is perhaps understandable, then, that we approach Nobbs with a certain amount of cynicism.
The eponymous Nobbs (Glenn Close) is a mousy, fastidious creature who works as a waiter in a second-tier Dublin hotel sometime early in the last century. Such establishments were like the heavily-staffed “great houses” beloved of BBC period dramas— places that operated under a working truce between upstairs and backstairs. Nobbs, a model employee, is so good at seeming unexceptional in both worlds that he’s under the radar before radar was even invented. The script (written in collaboration with Close herself) isn’t coy long about why: “Mister” Nobbs is a woman on the run from a bitter past as an orphan, who tolerates years of scurrying like a rat in hopes of achieving her dream of one day owning her own tobacco-shop.
The prerequisite here lies in playing a woman who masquerades as a man so well she fools her colleagues for years. Close lends Nobbs a certain physical dignity by giving him a lack of flexibility in his neck and shoulders, as if a man is just a woman with fewer working joints, and speaks in a whatever is the opposite of a falsetto but sounds equally phony. Poor Nobbs is somehow hairless as a gecko at a time when facial hair on men was de rigeur, has no discernible Adam’s apple, and works long hours at the hotel but never shows a hint of five o’clock shadow. In this, Close’s performance is more admirable than convincing.
None of these problems are fatal, though. Nobbs’ real ambition, after all, is not to be a man but to be invisible. Though some might take this movie to be about the freedom to express one’s inner sexual identity—to mistake it for transgender empowerment or some equally absurd anachronism—the script is emphatically not about any of that. Nobbs is pretending for economic reasons, just as the hotel’s cut-throat owner (Pauline Collins) selectively plays the hapless ninny and local handyman (Aaron Johnson) pretends to be a expert boiler mechanic when he isn’t. As hinted at by the hotel’s carousing nobles (The Tudors’ Jonathan Rhys Meyers, in a strangely abortive role), true gender-bending has always been with us, but only as the prerogative of the leisure classes.
Amid the general drabness, the film presents one bright spot in Janet McTeer’s deft performance as Hubert, a housepainter with a secret much like Nobbs’. Where Close comes off as a skilled actress working hard to play a man, McTeer just seems mannish without any of the artifice or fuss. Hubert walks around with a bust bigger than Dolly Parton’s, yet nobody would dare accuse this hulking, man-breasted dude of being a lady—and we just believe it. Whatever McTeer is playing, she finds some element of joy in an otherwise dreary story. Let Oscar take notice.
© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro
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