How does the movie albert nobbs end

Secondly, in Albert Nobbs , Glenn Close plays a man who is tremendously shy and reserved and given to very little openness and has in every way done such a good job of burying everything about his personality and hopes and fears, that there is, in a very real sense, no personality left; just the "Albert Nobbs" costume that this self-negating, genderless person wears as armor against everyone else in the world.

Close plays this man very well , which means that she does an exemplary job of giving a surface-level performance, which is the kind of praise that no matter how generously it is meant, just won't come out sounding like a compliment. Here, then, is the problem with Albert Nobbs : it is a movie about Glenn Close playing a man who has no inner life, and no matter how good it might be at this goal, the results are de facto not going to be very engaging, because there's only so much you can do with a character who is by design not interesting and has nothing to say, without turning out a movie that is also not interesting and has nothing to say.

It is a story she evidently believes in with all her being, and that ends up meaning that she is so absolutely certain that Albert Nobbs is a fantastic character and his drama an outstanding narrative, that all she has to do is give Nobbs life and the rest will follow. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and my notion is that it might have been a good thing to do something, anything at all, interesting with the part, and not just be the most convincing empty husk of a man she could be.

Since Albert Nobbs , as it is currently assembled, doesn't care about anything else besides Albert Nobbs and, especially, foregrounding Close's performance of him, the whole movie really wasn't going to survive that particular flaw; the result is a quintessential awards-season prestige costume drama that goes nowhere and does nothing, not even when it tosses in a hugely superfluous subplot with Helen Dawes Mia Wasikowska , a maid at the hotel where Albert works as head of staff, and her affair with Joe Macken Aaron Johnson , a dashing rapscallion plumber.

Eventually this intersects with the main plot if it's fair to call "man who is really a woman in drag is full of self-doubt" by the noble name "plot" in a way that seems pointedly calculated to make every single character in the movie less interesting and likable, not that "likable" is any kind of prerequisite for a good movie, but if the only other choices are "boring" and "grating", it would have been a welcome change.

The one and only bright side to all of this- actually, that's not fair. There are two bright sides, one of which is the physical production of the movie - production design by Patrizia von Brandenstein, costumes by Pierre-Yves Gayraud - which is the absolute best kind of eye candy if you are even marginally a fan of 19th Century period dramas, as I hope and pray we all are.

But there's an even better bright side, which is Janet McTeer's performance as Hubert Page, the brusque painter hired at the hotel and obliged to bunk with Albert. Given that McTeer doesn't even have a gender-neutral first name like "Glenn", it's no real surprise that Hubert also turns out to be a woman dressed as a man for primarily economic reasons.

Unlike Close, McTeer doesn't convince as a man very much, but it simply doesn't matter, because she plays Hubert to perfection, where all of Close's exceptional physicality can't make Albert seem like anything else but a fictional character.

McTeer steams through the movie like a mad bull, devouring scenes and co-stars whole, greedily stealing every moment - just like the crude, graceless Hubert might do - and generally making Albert Nobbs absolutely thrilling stuff whenever she's on-screen.

Perversely, it's the kind of "one good performance" that throws everything else into relief and makes the whole rest of the movie that much harder to appreciate; if it could get that one character and all of his trappings so absolutely right, why couldn't it get anything else right?

Why not ask questions about gender, or sexuality, or economic status, or identity, all of which are right there at the very surface of the material, begging to be exploded all over the place there's one scene that actually does kind of get at some of this, involving women's clothes and a run on the beach, and it's so much better than anything else in the movie that it hurts? Why not tell a rich and weird story, rather than just grind through the bland intrigues of the second half, and the blander lack of anything even a little bit like intrigue in the first?

I actually felt very fulfilled by the whole experience. Perhaps Close, as an actor, is not much fuelled by conventional acceptance. Midway through her audition for the stage role in , she broke off and said: "I'm boring myself so I must be boring you.

I think I'm going to go home. Maybe what they saw was an unusual abashment, which Close — for all her professional steel — seems to share with the character. It's telling that her big passion project is not one dripping with showreel moments. That sixth consecutive Oscar defeat may have stung more than she has let on, but there's no way such a subtle turn stood a chance against the showboat delivered by Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady.

Streep is the crucial counterpoint to Close's career. There's even a slight slippage between their roles: Streep's lead in The Devil Wears Prada took cues from Close's fashionista Cruella De Vil, just as Close's ruthless lawyer on TV show Damages completes the circle with another tough boss. Yet Streep is somehow perceived as the more easily lovable star; once an uncomplicated pinup, now an aspirational dame. Close's appeal is slippier. Yet it was he double-bill of bitches in Fatal Attraction and Dangerous Liaisons that cemented the reputation.

Even before Albert Nobbs, her best performances teetered towards drag, riffed on her strong jaw and ballsy gaze her Damages character is called "a real hard-dick bitch" in the pilot.

Yet even when they're panto, they're never quite camp. While Streep embraces the wink and the nudge, Close goes full-throttle on the integrity, with no space for spin. Analysis is her way in: the first thing she did after landing the Fatal Attraction part was to send the script to two psychiatrists. Albert's problem, she thinks, is similar to her character's in that film: she hadn't processed being sexually abused as a child. Close likes identifying the trigger: "When I played Blanche Dubois on stage, I thought: this person has classic post-traumatic stress disorder from seeing her lover blow his head off in front of her.

Has she ever experienced equivalent stress? It's impossible to know. Close is warm enough on the phone, but she has never opened up about what are obliquely referred to as her "dark days", when she toured Vietnam military bases with Up With People , a Moral Re-Armament-supporting folk group, whose guitarist she married. They split after five years; Close enrolled at drama school, and has been a Democrat ever since.

Nonetheless, she does believe that trauma can make a person. They have a certain kind of soul. With Albert, she didn't want to be discovered and so she's not angry or confrontational, she's just shut a part of herself down. It wasn't like she had huge expectations for her life. I think what every human being seeks is safety and connection. Albert has this vision of two chairs and a warm comforting fire, and that is her dream.

She has no idea he's a woman; she just thinks he's a weirdo - and it's hard not to agree. For sure, characters that watch and wait, like Albert Nobbs, can be unsettling, no matter how Chaplinesque and well meaning. Desire denied has its disturbing shadow element, and as Albert dreams of a fulfilled life, his delusion and repression radiate an uncomfortable air.

Characters as out of touch and desperate as Albert Nobbs awaken an instinctive doubt and distrust in an audience. Now in a story meant to be read, this distasteful edge would not be present. Nor would it be present onstage. But the poetic equation of this kind of tale, which would function metaphorically and suggestively in another medium, becomes literal and real in the rougher medium of the screen.

And realism's demands push us in directions that do Albert Nobbs - and the film "Albert Nobbs" - no favors. There is an undeniable ick factor, borne in part by Close's viability and detailed and strong acting. If she weren't so good in the role, Albert might be easier to take, but as it stands, she is a convincing, mysterious and, to be honest, repellent person, one who is alert to others in a way that would freak people out.

Still, as a years-after-the-fact record of what Close once did onstage, the movie has some value.