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63The double deception of suppressed personality and repressed sexuality could have been the basis for a rewarding character study, but after Albert meets a kindred spirit and dares to dream of a happy ending, her denial and naivete become too much to swallow.
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50The performance is extraordinary, literally: Close resembles no man I've ever seen, or woman either. She's the personification of fear - the fear of being seen through, seen for what she is.
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70Ms. McTeer's sly, exuberant performance is a pure delight, and the counterpoint between her physical expressiveness and Ms. Close's tightly coiled reserve is a marvel to behold. The rest of the film is a bit too decorous and tidy to count as a major revelation, but it dispenses satisfying doses of humor, pathos and surprise.
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Apr 16, 201240Good performances, but it's difficult to give two hoots about Close's passion project when the story remains as pinched and hermetic as poor little Albert Nobbs himself.
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Feb 2, 201275The film surrounding the performance is not always as strong, but the centre holds, and magnificently so.
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40Imagine a different film on a similar theme, with Hubert moved to center stage and García replaced by Pedro Almodóvar, for whom cross-dressers in a Catholic country would be meat and drink. Poor Albert could then retreat into the shadows, where he so evidently belongs, emerging only to pour the wine and clear away the feast.
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50Albert Nobbs is the rare double drag king bill you could plausibly take your grandmother to. It's genteel, well-crafted, mostly sexless and frequently dull - a movie that, like its title character, never quite dares to let itself discover what it really wants to be.
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60Rodrigo Garcia's film only intermittently surmounts the limitations of the central character's parched emotional existence and restricted horizons, and the resolutions to some principal dramatic lines seem rather too easy.
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60Repression is one thing, but discontent generally breeds self-knowledge and rich interior lives, two things that are eerily absent here. Regardless, the film features some really intriguing conflicts and solid performances throughout.
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75The sadness and almost Chaplinesque pathos that ensues is well wrought and Close, although she is so recessive that at times she seems to fade into the ether, is quite touching.
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75Like the man himself, Albert Nobbs is a sweet, sad, sensitive little film, a haunting reminder that each of us, on some level, is impersonating someone.
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50Though the movie drips and aches with good intentions, I do wonder how lesbians may feel about seeing lesbianism presented as a mere traumatized distortion of female heterosexuality.
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75The chief attraction of Albert Nobbs is the acting.
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30As an experiment in Academy Award psychology, Albert Nobbs is fascinating. As drama? It is, forgive us, a drag.
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75As the title character in Albert Nobbs, Glenn Close skulks through Edwardian-era Dublin like a eunuch on a stealth mission.
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75Albert Nobbs is a quiet, minor-key work. The period finery is Masterpiece Classics-y, the parade of upper-crust and lower-tier eccentrics predictable. But Close's performance as this poor, wounded fellow resonates with depth and poignancy.
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70With its unpredictable sexual politics and quirky little hero/heroine Albert Nobbs has the edge of quinine, a peculiar taste that won't entice everyone but worked for me.
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63The play itself, some felt, was static. The charge I'm afraid will stick to the film version as well. But the acting is considerable compensation.
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50Though Istvan Szabo (Being Julia) was slated to direct at one point, the assignment ultimately went to Rodrigo Garcia, who's known for his female ensemble dramas (Nine Lives, Mother and Child) but demonstrates no particular affinity for this material.
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88Most movies about people passing themselves off as the opposite sex can't sustain the illusion, but "Nobbs" does.
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75Albert Nobbs is not a movie about gender politics; it's about trusting in the fundamental goodness of others and accepting one's need for companionship, and the way in which Close slowly reveals Albert's closed-off heart is poignant and often surprisingly funny, though never in a mocking way.
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60Close's performance is a study in repression -- too much so, really.
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50Albert Nobbs is the furthest thing from a comedy, although as a character study of cultural mores and stations and the lengths human beings will go to to circumvent them, it's fascinating stuff.
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75Close never steps wrong, never breaks reality. My heart went out to Albert Nobbs, the depth of whose fears are unimaginable. But it is Janet McTeer who brings the film such happiness and life as it has, because the tragedy of Albert Nobbs is that there can be no happiness in her life. The conditions she has chosen make it impossible.
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50Close's performance is technically perfect and emotionally pinched, which is exactly what her role calls for, but it doesn't make a compelling movie.
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50A middling attempt to peek through a lace curtain for a glimpse of the other Upstairs/Downstairs staff members only leads to too many distracting social functions that fail to relieve the film's otherwise solemn pacing.
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80García, previously the director of "Mother and Child," "Passengers" and numerous TV episodes (and the son of Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez), never feels entirely comfortable with the period or location, but for all its limitations Albert Nobbs has a puzzling undertow, and gets more involving the longer you stick with it.
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67Close's passion for the character she plays - a role, she has explained in interviews, that has absorbed her since she first played Nobbs on stage 30 years ago - contains its own intrigue.
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80I'm pretty sure that the terrific British actress Janet McTeer never meant to act Close out of every frame they share, but she surely does as Hubert, a cheerful bruiser who brings his own secrets to the party, as well as a monumentally fake broken nose, a kind heart and a practical gift for converting adversity to advantage.
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75As directed with grit and grace by Rodrigo García, this quietly devastating film goes bone-deep.
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63If you take away Albert Nobbs' twist, all that's left is a project that would have been at home on Masterpiece Theater during its heyday.
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40When the filmmakers move into Nobbs' isolation, though, the movie flags - a surprise given Garcia's excellent work on HBO's minimalist personality study "In Treatment," on which he wrote and directed extensively.
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Dec 22, 201150It's a career-crowning role for Glenn Close. Too bad the film is such a drag.
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63The film never gets to the heart of Nobbs - a woman who lives as a man. She comes across as more of a sad, clownish figure than a flesh-and-blood human, playing her emotions so close to the vest that it's hard to care about this stoic character.
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40Close and McTeer, an evenly matched odd-couple pairing, keep it real. They do the heavy lifting, and are utterly enchanting, whether in bonnets or boots.
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65As Mr. Albert Nobbs, Close wears a discreetly waved cap of cropped ginger hair and the bright, blank expression of a small animal caught mid-nibble.
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50Say this for Albert Nobbs: It's not some run-of-the-mill "life lived in service" drama.
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40The unintentional hilarity of the whole enterprise - especially when Albert attempts to romance one of the hotel's naive employees (Wasikowska) - at least keeps you engaged, as does the scene-by-scene suspense over which pitiably wide-eyed expression Close will choose to use next. Hopefully, she's practicing her gracious-loser face for awards season.
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30Close's prosthetic makeup renders her face too immobile, a marked contrast with her unfixed accent; both highlight the pitfalls of a star's idée fixe. It's a shame, because the material - based on a novella by George Moore published in the 1927 collection Celibate Lives - deserves better.
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75It's no less of an accomplished performance than Hilary Swank's similar turn in "Boys Don't Cry" or newcomer Zoé Herán's delicate achievement as the lead in "Tomboy." Unfortunately, Albert Nobbs traps Close's sizable talent in a simplistic drama--not unlike Nobbs herself who winds up trapped in a restrictive period.
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Dec 20, 201125Perhaps thrown by the challenge of having to direct women as men and not just as themselves, director Rodrigo Garcia turns in what may be his poorest effort to date, opting for a nearly airless tone, presenting a look that's sadly un-cinematic, and presiding over a collection of performers that seem to be operating on very different planes, and with accents of varying thicknesses.
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Dec 19, 201163Unfortunately, Albert is so good at being unobtrusive, he nearly disappears from his own story, making it hard for us to get invested in it.