'Nobbs' questions identity

By Aaren Pastor     2/1/12 6:00pm

Albert Nobbs is a quiet film that belies the tensions beneath its primly mannered veneer. It roils with economies of love, sex, emotions and money in a 19th century Irish hotel. The primary question driving the film is "What makes people live such miserable lives?" thus revealing the wounded self-imprisonment of one person around whom the film revolves.

Rodrigo Garcia, who has directed episodes of The Sopranos and In Treatment, brings his facially focused, muted color palette to the table to construct this almost flat composition film. There is a paucity of emotion, leavened only in the sexual innuendos that abound but fail to authentically portray the quality of life necessary to make a great film. Garcia directs Glenn Close (Evening), who co-wrote the script and stars as Albert Nobbs, a woman who assumed a male identity at 14 in order to survive and has since become so subsumed into this gendered role as an efficient butler that he no longer recalls his female name.

Nobbs is jolted into re-awareness of what he's been doing — the falseness of his adult life — when he meets Hubert, a house painter, who discovers he is a woman after spending the night in Nobbs' room. Janet McTeer (The Woman in Black), a little-known actress in the U.S., gives a mesmerizing, illuminating performance as Hubert. In a display of terrified groveling, Nobbs curls into the corner like a beaten dog, cringing for mercy and protection. In a moment of such pathos, it makes the audience uneasy to see how precarious Nobbs' position is, how desperate he must have been to build his life on such a secret.

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Hubert, whose charisma attracts the women of the hotel left and right, reveals to Nobbs a secret of his own — he, too, is a woman. There lie the two poles of the film: one so easy in his identity he exudes naturalness and one so terrified he is stiff, distant. Such a miserable life indeed.

So inspired by Hubert's niche, which includes a wife, Nobbs is inspired to do the same. Instead of a marriage for love, Nobbs is on the path to defy more conventions, pushing him farther and farther from questions of self he so desperately needs to examine.

Enter Helen Dawes, (Mia Wasikowska, Jane Eyre) the flighty, pert maid at the hotel whom Nobbs decides to "walk out with." You want to like her but she proves herself a manipulative girl, extorting gifts from Nobbs in exchange for a promenade in the park. Instead she falls for Joe, (Aaron Johnson, Nowhere Boy) the boiler-fixer, who offers her the world, then abandons her when she becomes pregnant. The relationship between the two strikes another knot of wrenching pathos: two poor kids, he trying not to become his drunk, dead-beat father, but ultimately leaving Helen and she naive and foolish. You see the love, the struggle and how both are ultimately swept back into the lives they had tried so desperately to escape.

The actors in the film are superb, each giving a masterful performance, especially Brendan Gleeson (The Guard) as the drunk Dr. Holloran and friend to Nobbs who discovers his secret. Pauline Collins captures audiences as the greedy, hussy Mrs. Baker, a conniving hotelier. The seductive villain pilfers all of Nobbs' careful savings he's hidden for years under the floorboard and uses them to buy herself new finery and a new hotel facade. Yet, after the tragedy that marks the end of the film, there is a note of hope in the figure of Hubert.

Though the actors shine, there is a muted quality to the film that makes it fall flat. The humor is just the slightest bit off, the plot just a bit lacking, the piano score just too tinkly and all prevent this movie from being a true tour de force.

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