Albert Nobbs

Showtimes: 

No screenings currently scheduled.

Go to the official site

113 min.

Directed by: 

Rodrigo Garcia

Starring: 

Glenn Close

Janet McTeer

Pauline Collins

Mia Wasikowska

Brendan Gleeson

Aaron Johnson

Screenplay by: 

Glenn Close

John Banville

Gabriella Prekop

Based on the short story by George Moore

Rated 14A; Coarse Language, Sexual Content

'I think you’re the strangest man I’ve ever met,' someone remarks at one point to our hero, and they’ve got a point. Albert Nobbs seems a deeply weird – perhaps even too freaky – chap, with his odd appearance and titchy figure and strangled voice and unwillingness to socialise.
Reason being: he’s a she – something discovered by a jobbing painter who’s forced to share Nobbs’s garret attic at the Dublin hotel where he’s employed. But as luck would have it, the painter has a similar secret, and Nobbs, desperate for a bosom buddy, takes inspiration from his/her story, in particular the fact that he/she appears to have found a wife. So he embarks on a mission to woo unwitting maid Mia Wasikowska – an enterprise that seems doomed to disaster given Nobbs’s lack of obvious charms.

Close is, obviously, terrific, and the gradual stripping off of her layers of artifice is highly affecting and artistically justified, as well as machine-tooled for the awards showreel. What makes Rodrigo García’s movie more than the sum of just one part is the space and time devoted to the supporting cast, from Pauline Collins’s flirt of a landlady to Brendan Gleeson’s boozy hotel doctor. Janet McTeer is astonishing as the painter, and Mia Wasikowska adds more heart to the dimpled maid role than it requires. This is a gripping ensemble piece, good-humoured even at the end of its tether.

– Catherine Shoard, The Guardian