Two titanic actresses are battling it out for Best Actress Oscar this year — Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady and Glenn Close in Rodrigo Garcia’s Albert Nobbs [2011]. Streep’s Margaret Thatcher is the showier role, of course, which may in fact clinch the statuette — but it’s a performance in a film that’s despicably made, and one cannot commend it without losing a fair share of marbles. I liked Albert Nobbs better than the mess Phyllida Lloyd has made, although this contains a performance that ranks far below Close’s career bests — in Fatal Attraction, in Dangerous Liaisons, in The World According to Garp, in Reversal of Fortune, in Meeting Venus. That it’s a role that has brought her back some Oscar attention is something I’m pleased with. But it won’t win. Because her role as a woman in turn-of-the-century Ireland trapped in the guise of a man to work as a butler in a hotel requires Close to be so internal, so closed-up, all the acting occurs in the eyes, in the furtive movements, in the subtle uncertainties. Alas, it also ends the way it ends — as a kind of tragedy that feels so much more like a contrived Deux ex machina calculated to be a tear-jerker, or at least something we can pity with. It’s the one thing about the film that leaves me cold. In the end, there is also this: Albert Nobbs will be quickly forgotten in the coming years. You just know it as you’re watching it. It’s destined to be a footnote to Glenn Close’s illustrious career. I hope she just goes ahead and convinces Andrew Lloyd Webber to do a film version of Sunset Boulevard, the musical. She has already made a mark on that role in theater. She might as well go on and try to do the same thing on film. Who knows, but that will finally clinch her the little naked golden man.
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Two titanic actresses are battling it out for Best Actress Oscar this year — Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady and Glenn Close in Rodrigo Garcia’s Albert Nobbs [2011]. Streep’s Margaret Thatcher is the showier role, of course, which may in fact clinch the statuette — but it’s a performance in a film that’s despicably made, and one cannot commend it without losing a fair share of marbles. I liked Albert Nobbs better than the mess Phyllida Lloyd has made, although this contains a performance that ranks far below Close’s career bests — in Fatal Attraction, in Dangerous Liaisons, in The World According to Garp, in Reversal of Fortune, in Meeting Venus. That it’s a role that has brought her back some Oscar attention is something I’m pleased with. But it won’t win. Because her role as a woman in turn-of-the-century Ireland trapped in the guise of a man to work as a butler in a hotel requires Close to be so internal, so closed-up, all the acting occurs in the eyes, in the furtive movements, in the subtle uncertainties. Alas, it also ends the way it ends — as a kind of tragedy that feels so much more like a contrived Deux ex machina calculated to be a tear-jerker, or at least something we can pity with. It’s the one thing about the film that leaves me cold. In the end, there is also this: Albert Nobbs will be quickly forgotten in the coming years. You just know it as you’re watching it. It’s destined to be a footnote to Glenn Close’s illustrious career. I hope she just goes ahead and convinces Andrew Lloyd Webber to do a film version of Sunset Boulevard, the musical. She has already made a mark on that role in theater. She might as well go on and try to do the same thing on film. Who knows, but that will finally clinch her the little naked golden man.