Glenn Close plays a woman pretending to be a man so that she could get a job and then just kind of never stopped pretending. Like Yentl, this is a story set in the bad old days when a woman couldn’t expect much out of life. And, also like Yentl, this was a film that didn’t make much sense.
Our hero/heroine is a small man working as a waiter at a residence hotel in Dublin in around 1918 or so. This story was actually written in 1918, which makes me wonder, how common was this whole transvestite thing to get a job? Maybe not all that common, as Albert only meets one other woman passing as a man in her thirty years of hiding her sex. This other woman living as a man has taken a wife-a concept that amazes Albert Nobbs. But then, he/she seems to be amazed by pretty much everything.
Part of the problem is that Glenn Close is a tad long in the tooth for the part. At 64 she is more than a little creepy in her pursuit of a 21 year old Mia Wasikowska-whether it’s an old man or an old woman pursuing a very young person, it’s just creepy.
My favorite woman pretending to be a man story is Victor/Victoria, a wonderfully odd story which was written in 1933. We all like to think we invented the world, but it really has all been done before.
Albert Nobbs was a lovely film, from the sets and costumes to the wonderful cast. Glenn Close was wrong for the part, but hey, it was her film so she was unlikely to hire someone else to play the part. In the end the problem was the story, not the acting. The tagline for Albert Nobbs could have been Life sucks and then you die.
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