Albert Nobbs
I know a book that opens with: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” This is one of the saddest movies I have ever seen, “Albert Nobbs.” A woman chooses to live in a fearful and unnatural way and must live in terror every second.
As you may know by now, Albert Nobbs (played by Glenn Close in an Oscar-nominated performance) is not a man. She works as butler and waiter in a 19th century Dublin hotel, where she dresses as a man and passes for one because a woman can’t get hired for those jobs, and she needs the job security. We can understand that much; but it’s still not worth it. Passing for one sex or another or both happens for many reasons to many people, but my understanding is that for most of them even if they themselves are unaware of what’s going on at first it does answer real emotional needs.
Albert Nobbs isn’t happy being a man. I doubt she’s ever happy at all. There’s something rigid and sexless about her; we get the feeling she has never had any sexual experience and doesn’t want any. Her whole life revolves around economic security; she lives in sheer terror of being found out. Look at her body language: shy, repressed, withdrawn, trying to blend into the wallpaper.
The hotel is a crossroads in Dublin for people who have some money but no particular distinction or special importance. It’s run by Mrs. Baker (Pauline Collins), who sails through life like a big jolly ship but wouldn’t win any awards as an employer. People come and go; employees come and go; odd fellows like Albert pass through strange doors I suppose every day. Homosexuality is no stranger here; Viscount Yarrell (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) checks in with his crew of free-drinkers, specifying an adjoining room for his friend. But Albert Nobbs is not a homosexual of any kind; it would be simpler if she were.
One day, to paint some of the rooms, comes Hubert Page (played by Janet McTeer). Hubert is tall, skinny, smokes like a chimney, banters; and to our eyes at least, most obviously: she is a woman. She gets through life on personality and guts. She looks at Albert for about 30 seconds and does the most amazing thing that has ever happened to Albert in her life so far on this planet Earth: She bares her breasts and tells her secret. I wonder if that’s when Albert first realized that she wasn’t the only one who had ever passed for another sex?
Those are the only scenes in this movie that hold out any hope for poor old Albert. The two women have a liberating day at the beach together; and Hubert takes Albert home with her to meet her wife Cathleen (played by Bronagh Gallagher with soft-spoken calmness and tact). It becomes evident then or maybe even before then that poor old Albert doesn’t really know what men do with women or what women do with men or what either one might get up to in private when they can manage to be alone there together.
But she has a dream. There’s a storefront she’s got her eye on which she thinks would make just the nicest little tobacco shop in the front tea room in the back set-up. And an upstairs room somewhere or other or it might as well be anywhere at all where you could share your bed with your “wife.” In an act of appalling naivete, she casts Helen (played by Mia Wasikowska), a young housemaid at the hotel, in this role. For Albie it’s strictly business; no romance involved.
In the context of this performance, Glenn Close is so courageous. He has transformed Albert into a real person; as such she could only have been more miserable and despicable while alive. Irish realist writer George Moore (1852-1933) may have known actual examples in Dublin who resemble those described in his story upon which this film is based.
In 1982, Close starred in an Off-Broadway production of a play adapted from it but always wanted to turn that into a movie afterward. Around 2001 the Hungarian director Istvan Szabo was involved with this project before Rodrigo Garcia made it his own he knows women characters well having directed “Nine Lives” and “Mother and Child.”
In my opinion, Close never missteps or breaks with reality. My heart bleeds for Albert Nobbs whose fears are bottomless pits; however Janet McTeer brought joy into the film as much as there can be any because no happiness can ever enter her life since it’s prohibited by what she chose as conditions for living.
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