Despite promising premise, ‘Albert Nobbs’ feels like a vanity project foremost aimed at Oscar

Movies like Albert Nobbs annoy the hell out of me. Co-produced and co-written by Glenn Close, who not only also stars but even acted as a location scout, Albert Nobbs seems to exist for one purpose – to win Close an Academy Award.

(At that, it just might succeed: Close was nominated this week for a best actress Oscar for her role though, personally, I’d love to see Janet McTeer get the prize for her fine work here in a supporting role.)

In principle, I’d rather see a movie geared for awards than one made solely to make money, but Albert Nobbs makes me yearn to stay home and read a good book instead.

Like the most soulless summer popcorn movie, Albert Nobbs feels made by committee. It was directed by Rodrigo Garcia who has done good work as a writer-director for both film and television. Here, he was hired only to direct and it feels like the Colombian-born Garcia (his father was the famed novelist Gabrial Garcia Marquez) failed to connect emotionally with the material. Anyway, it must be difficult to direct your boss, especially when she’s as hands-on as Close is here and her involvement with the story goes back 25 years.

Close first played the Albert Nobbs character in an Off-Broadway adaptation of the original George Moore short story. The story focuses on a woman in late 19th century Ireland who has lived her life as a man. She did it in order to survive.

Orphaned at a young age and penniless, she first donned male clothing as a teenager after she was raped by a gang of thugs. Not only did passing as male make it less likely that she would be abused in that way again, but it also helped her get a job that paid better wages than she could get as a woman.

We encounter Albert in middle age, a withdrawn waiter in a snooty Dublin hotel. She never knew her real parents or her real name. Whatever identity she had before she became Albert is so submerged that she is as a lost soul, utterly, pitiably alone.

By chance, she meets another woman who has been living as a man (McTeer, magnificient in the role) and suddenly Albert doesn’t feel quite so isolated. When she learns that Hubert (McTeer’s character) has taken a wife, it awakens in Albert the dream of also finding a life mate. Unfortunately, Albert is as clueless about the ways of courtship as Travis Bickle (another lost, lonely soul) was in Taxi Driver.

She focuses on a young hotel maid, Helen, played by Mia Wasikowska, who happens to be in love with somebody else, someone closer to her age, someone not as peculiar.

These are desperate times in Ireland. There is much talk of escaping for the promise of a better life in America. Albert also dreams of escape. For years, he has saved his money. He wants to own his own business. He dreams of someday retiring and living near the ocean. Now his dreams of paradise includes another.

It is easy to see what, besides the possibility of an Oscar, might have drawn Close to the character. Albert is, potentially, fascinating. One of the most interesting parts of the story for me is its portrait of women struggling to live self-sufficient lives in a world where to be an unmarried woman is to exist one step away from the poorhouse. Albert Nobbs is a story about issues – feminism, gay identity – that did not have names. Despite the movie’s faults, I can envision it striking an emotional chord with some viewers.

It’s just too bad it’s wrapped up in such a fundamentally uninteresting vanity project where the star’s performance – despite its craftsmanship – rarely stops feeling like a stunt.