Movie Review: Albert Nobbs

Posted by Charmaine Blake on Jan 26th, 2012 in Drama, Oscar Buzz | 0 comments

Movie Review: Albert Nobbs

Albert Nobbs created a worldwide sensation with its gender-bending portrayal of a woman trying to make a living in man’s world. Glenn Close created a whole new persona when it comes to her portrayal in the movie Albert Nobbs. It will also be a great time to announce that the lovely Glenn Close got a nomination for Best Actress at the 2012 Oscar Award Nomination held on January 24th 2012. Albert Nobbs is already out in theaters and is creating a lot of buzz in the process.

Here is a movie review from Mark Naglazas:

“The problem with movies about shy, repressed characters is that the films themselves risks resembling their heroes, an imitation of lives of such little consequence that it ends not with a bang, not even with a whimper, more a Beckettian final exhalation.

It can be done, of course. Hal Ashby managed to make Peter Sellers’ simple-minded gardener in Being There endlessly interesting by dramatising the ways the people he encountered projected on to him; while Anthony Hopkins, playing the painfully buttoned-down butler in The Remains of the Day, excavated layer upon layer of emotion and meaning.

Glenn Close also shoots for Hopkins-like richness and complexity playing a butler in Albert Nobbs, an adaptation of a novella by George Moore about a woman who passes herself off as a man in order to hold down a job serving in a posh hotel in Victorian-era Dublin.

And to some extent she achieves it. Despite having her womanly curves encased in a black suit, a face as frozen as an Easter Island statue and a voice as strangulated as the rest of her being, Close still manages to communicate something of Albert’s anguish in spending every waking moment in denial of her true self.

Close manages to further force open the window to her soul during a warm and funny sequence in which Albert surreptitiously dons a dress for the first time in years for a seaside romp, with the five-time Oscar nominee capturing so many layers of sexual ambiguity and confusion – a woman pretending to be a man struggling to remember being a woman – it’s head-spinning.

However, it is one of the rare moments in which Albert Nobbs comes alive, a desperately needed burst of emotion and spontaneity in a film so focused on a character buried inside her stiff-upper-lip proper English gentleman guise you spend most of the time begging for her to be outed.

Indeed, the best strand of Albert Nobbs involves another woman who immediately sees through her pretence, a strapping, pipe-smoking house painter named Hubert Page (a vivacious, Jane Lynch-like turn from Janet McTeer, best known for her 1999 film Tumbleweeds).

Mr Page reveals herself by lifting up her shirt and revealing a magnificent pair of breasts and then proceeds to explain to a startled Albert that she has pushed the ruse so hard she even has found herself a “wife” and is leading a life of God-fearing rectitude.

Her example spurs on Albert to pursue his own dream, which involves a little business (a shop in the high street) and, he now realises, a wife to complete the picture of Victorian domestic bliss (details on Hubert’s relationship with his lady are left sketchy but we have to assume it is a full-blown lesbian love affair).

Thus the heart of the movie is Albert’s doomed courtship of a pretty hotel maid named Helen (Mia Wasikowska) whose own boyfriend, a thuggish, grease-smeared handyman (Aaron Johnson) sees in the old butler’s pursuit of her hand in marriage a chance for financial gain.

This description makes Albert Nobbs sound a lot better than it actually is. Director Rodrigo Garcia has certainly done a wonderful job in recreating 19th century Dublin but in sticking so closely to period propriety it condemns the movie to a certain mustiness, giving it an antique quality that prevents it speaking to our own time.”

You can read the full article at au.news.yahoo.com

Read more about the latest “Oscar Buzz” movies right in this blog.

Charmaine Blake loves movies, musical theater listening to music and taking pictures of anything that she finds interesting. She is a voracious reader and writer, and enjoys her time writing for New Movie Launches. Charmaine loves spending time with her pets and currently has a Siberian Husky, a toy poodle and a cat.