Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, Thoreau said, and the subject of the slight drawing-room drama “Albert Nobbs” is certainly one of them. Well, except for an anatomical technicality.
Albert (Glenn Close) is a longtime servant at an upscale Dublin hotel. Beloved by staff and patrons alike, “he” is perfectly suited for a life of servitude: able to stand statue-like as aristocrats (such as Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ bisexual bon vivant) cavort in the hallways, and armed with an encyclopedic memory of frequent lodgers’ likes and dislikes — much to the approval of the hotel’s peppery proprietress (Pauline Collins).
Unfortunately, Albert is so good at being unobtrusive, he nearly disappears from his own story, making it hard for us to get invested in it.
When he finally closes and bolts the door to his bedroom, we hope we’ll see the woman behind the man. Instead, it’s Albert’s painstaking inventory of his tips as he hides them beneath the floorboards. It seems she has been a he for so long, there’s not only no “she” there — there doesn’t seem to be much of anyone.
It’s an enigmatic yet understandably appealing role for Close, a likely Oscar contender, who first performed this role onstage 30 years ago. And you’d think the “Sarah Plain and Tall” actress would be a good candidate for drag. But even though it’s 19th-century Ireland and folks don’t have our easy familiarity with cross-dressing, it’s hard to believe her fellow staffers are buying this.
Or that they aren’t similarly suspicious of “Hubert Page” (stage actress Janet McTeer), a strapping house painter at the hotel who bears a striking resemblance to k.d. Lang.
Eventually the two swap secrets: Page, an abused wife, left home and found herself a good living, and a loving (and complicit) wife to boot. Albert, an orphan traumatized by early sexual violence, has been masquerading as a male since her teens. Now in middle age, she dreams of opening her own tobacco shop.
But her efforts at finding a wife to help her run it are met with disinterest by Helen (Mia Wasikowska), a spirited chambermaid who’s taken a fancy to the hotel’s hot-headed new boiler man (Aaron Johnson of “Kick-Ass”).
Even as Albert makes an effort to court Helen, the maid becomes a living embodiment of the bleak life that both Nobbs and Page have tried to escape. It’s a fascinating, tragic contrast — one to which director Rodrigo Garcia doesn’t pay enough attention.
The movie’s most affecting moment is a fantasy sequence in which Nobbs and Page don dresses and stroll through town. Looking so profoundly uncomfortable in skirts and bonnets, they finally convince you that while they may not be men, they have arrived at a new and as-yet-undefined other place entirely.