Spoiler alert: Mild spoilers contained herein.

Here, I’m once again straying from the critical pack; it must be that kind of year. The response to Albert Nobbs critically is pretty dismal, for what it is. For me the film — a longtime passion project of Glenn Close, who originated the lead role in a 1982 stage adaptation — has its flaws, but still resonated deeply without being manipulative. Close delivers a spot-on portrayal of Albert Nobbs, a woman hiding from her gender in Victorian-era Ireland by living as a man and working as a butler. Enter Hubert Page (Janet McTeer, who holds her own with Glenn Close and then some), another woman living as a man, whose very existence causes Albert to question the belief that his life must always be a solitary one. Here now, is a woman acting as a man, but doing so brashly, freely. Where Albert’s gender-switch has bound him into a life in hiding, Hubert hides right out in the open, having taken a jolly wife and made a home and a life with her.

Albert’s fortuitous meeting with Hubert and the subsequent revelation that Hubert is also a woman living as a man opens Albert’s mind to possibilities he’d never dared to even dream. A life where he could own a little tobacco shop, with rooms upstairs for living, with a cozy parlor kept by a charming wife where customers could gather to socialize — this, now, is exactly the life Albert’s been dreaming of through decades of button-lipped, demeaning service to the snooty, demanding asses of the upper classes, through countless evenings of saving coins under the floorboards. The woman Albert targets as his potential bride, the much younger, feisty maid Helen (Mia Wasikowska, also quite good here), though, has dreams of her own – dreams of a better life in America, free of the class restrictions that bind her so tightly in Ireland – and she’s tied her hopes and her heart to rakish, handsome, Joe Macken (Aaron Johnson) to get her there.

Joe encourages Helen to “step out” with Albert in the hopes that his lady love might persuade Albert to part with enough money to get them to America. Helen is reluctant but willingly allows Albert to spend hard-saved money on her, buying her sweets and baubles. And it’s heartbreaking to see the faintest glimmer of hope light fire in Albert’s constrained soul, as he grandly builds castles in the sky as substantive as soap bubbles. He looks at Helen and sees a potential friend, a life companion, a pretty wife at the counter to bring in the customers; she looks at him and sees only a weird, effeminate, little man she can never be attracted to, and she sees Albert’s dream of a little shop and apartment as an extension of the cage society has put around her by virtue of her birth. Further, Albert’s bland version of masculinity and sexuality holds no excitement for randy Helen, whose view of manhood has in turn been shaped by her own exposure to what constitutes gender identity – all sex and sweat, muscle and drink, abuse and apology. Helen’s view of what constitutes a “man” is so defined by the societal expectation of her class that she cannot see past Albert’s asexual exterior to see the safety and potential of the life he offers her. And even when she’s in trouble up to her eyebrows, she cannot see that Joe is not who she wants him to be, until it’s too late.

The whole thing is a very literary study in gender identity as a social construct, an exploration of what defines us as “male” and “female” beyond our genitalia. The success of both Albert and Hubert in surviving in their Victorian world as men is based solely on the exterior attributes that allow them to fit in as such. Hubert survives by adopting a swagger and bravado, and by working in a physically demanding manual labor job. Albert has survived by becoming a master chameleon, blending into the background, never speaking loudly or obtrusively, never giving anyone cause to look twice at him, never offering an opinion. Nightly, he counts his tips and adds them to his ledger, hides his treasure under the floorboards, saving up for a future he cannot yet fully imagine for himself.

All those things aside, though, direction by Rodrigo Garcia is a little uneven and obtuse, the story meanders here and there, and there’s a cleanness to Garcia’s depiction of life in Victorian-era Ireland that feels more problematic to me than anything else in the film.

The Victorian period, to me, is about the contrast between what we see on the surface and what lies beneath, and as such there was much to explore symbolically through a realistically unsanitary Victorian environment that would have better represented the inner turmoil of Albert Nobbs, who himself is hiding beneath the surface something very different from what he reveals to the world. Garcia’s Victorian Ireland is scrubbed just a little too clean – there should be rodents in the kitchen, maids dumping out pots of shit and piss from upper-class customers, dirt on the floors, dirt beneath fingernails, always in need of scrubbing; you should be able to smell the body odor and underlying layer of filth beneath the finery and brocade wallpaper here, but even when a typhoid epidemic rages through the hotel, it’s a very clean sort of epidemic. Actually, having seen Andrea Arnold’s take on Wuthering Heights at Toronto this year, I’d have liked to have seen what she would have done with this world and this material.

A good deal of the critical set seem turned off by Close’s buttoned-down performance, which is a little surprising to me considering that this is a story about a woman living as a man who’s completely shut herself down emotionally and disconnected from the rest of humanity. Close doesn’t hit you over the head with the depth of Albert’s soul-pain; the most important things in this film are not the things shown you in the film, but what those things imply. The emotions and inner turmoil of Albert Nobbs, the movie — much like Albert Nobbs, the character — are buried, camouflaged, like Nobbs himself, into the surroundings. But this is a smart and richly layered film, and if you take your time with it, pay attention to all the subtle nuances, and allow it to flow over you, it’s an emotionally rewarding, tragic tale.

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