Sweet Smell of Success - Film Review: Albert Nobbs

January 26, 2012

Dir. Rodrigo Garcia
Score: 4.0

A well-regarded actor, known for working both in film and theater, once remarked about the difference between the two mediums by dismissing acting for the silver screen as being done entirely through your eyes. If so, Glenn Close’s sunken marble orbs, set against a plain of pale forehead, are some of the more expressive in the business, and in playing a woman in turn-of-the-century Ireland who has to pass as a man in order to stay employed in a well-to-do hotel in Dublin, her eyes — drifting to the side in far reaching fantasy or widened in astonishment — are the only thing that give hint to her true self.

Nobbs (Close) works as a waiter in the hotel, always attired in a formal black suit and high waistcoat, quiet as a church mouse and wrapped in a binding to flatten her breasts, she is nothing if not self-oppressed. When, by chance, she meets another such female renegade, Mr. Page (Janet McTeer), working at the hotel as a housepainter, she is nearly speechless. More so, when she finds that Page isn’t just passing as a man, she’s actually married to wonderfully loving woman (Bronagh Gallagher). To the introverted and timid Nobbs — a woman who saves every pence and farthing and keeps a meticulous ledger of all her savings — the possibility of sharing her planned-for future happiness with another caring person is almost inconceivable, but intoxicating. Emboldened, she begins to court a young maid, Helen (Mia Wasikowska), who has already made an unfortunate dalliance with a young vagabond (Aaron Johnson), leaving her with child.

Rodrigo Garcia’s film is an odd mixture of elements — at times, especially in a scene that involves Nobbs and Page wearing dresses and walking the beach, it seems outright comedic (two women as men, dressed in female drag) — other times, the weight of the silent anguish of Nobbs is drearily oppressive. The trouble is we’re given only very small glimpses of the inner lives of any of the characters, and not enough, frankly, to support the film’s more melodramatic leanings. It is a common problem of the cinematic medium and one way in which novels tend to be far more successful: The representation of the inner life of a character. Here, despite several intonations to the contrary, we rarely go beyond skin deep.