An Unexpected Journey Home

Anticipation can be destructive. In the months leading up to the premiere of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, I found myself daring to hope that Jackson would strike gold once more--that this film would be a triumph of story-telling and visual effects on the same level as the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Day by day, the hope grew from a small kernel into an entire corn field...until the reviews starting rolling in. They were positive, for the most part, but not overwhelmingly so. Many "top film critics" complained that they didn't feel engaged in the story, that the pacing was too slow, that it  felt hackneyed and repetitive. Crestfallen, my hopes regressed. The anticipation gnawed at me still, but a new feeling took root: doubt. Was Peter Jackson's attempt to make The Hobbit, a straightforward, 300-page children's story, into an epic film trilogy nothing more than an intricate scheme to make himself even richer by capitalizing on J.R.R. Tolkien's life's work? Was Jackson selling out at the expense of quality? What if I hated The Hobbit?

These are the things that a die-hard, lifelong Tolkien fan worries about when someone--anyone, even the massively talented Jackson--attempts to adapt the stories of Middle Earth from the page to the big screen.

As it turns out, my fears were completely unfounded, and the "top film critics" are full of rubbish. The Hobbit is, from beginning to end, nothing short of perfection.

It wasn't the innovation or the novelty of The Hobbit that defined the quality of my viewing experience. It was its familiarity, the fact that it felt like an extension or an expansion of the LOTR trilogy. It was its similarity, yet differences; from the music to the costumes to the color palettes, it felt like meeting an old friend for the first time in a decade and learning about all the wonderful things she's seen and done since the last time you saw each other. This franchise is surely more than a money-maker for Jackson. He treats the Tolkien canon with reverence, and it shows in his films.

That's not to say that The Hobbit isn't, at times, rather silly and droll. After all, the main characters are the cheerful hobbit Bilbo Baggins and 13 hungry, boozy, loud, bombastic dwarves. Viewers may have grown accustomed to the stately elves and human warriors that were involved in the events of the LOTR films, and perhaps came to expect the same of the new trilogy. There is nothing inherently dignified or elegant about dwarves or hobbits; thus, their discourse and activities are proportionately outlandish. I found the dwarves' antics delightful and extremely true to the tone of Tolkien's work. Capturing the essence of a group of characters is difficult (one of the major failures of the Harry Potter movies, in my opinion), but Jackson succeeds, creating a charming pack of misfits that seem to have been lifted straight from the hundreds of thousands of pages that Tolkien wrote about Middle Earth. I respect Jackson's ability to adapt to the change in tone of The Hobbit films from the more sober LOTR. Those who criticized the silliness simply didn't understand that The Hobbit takes place when Middle Earth is not being directly threatened by the evil forces of Sauron, and that the relatively peaceful setting demands a different, more lighthearted tone.

In life, anticipation is often met with disappointment. Heinous tragedies occur of which no sense can be made. But I'm pleased to find that the refuge offered by the fantastical tales of Middle Earth, where good prevails over evil with comfortable predictability, is still here for us, in all its 48-frames-per-second visual splendor. The old adage says that you can never really go home, but for those of us devoted to Tolkien's Middle Earth, Jackson awards us with a unique opportunity to prove the adage--and those "critics"--delightfully wrong.

A Gender-Bender That Didn't Quite Bend

I tend to refrain from blogging about every movie that I watch, since I operate under the assumption that no one particularly cares what I think about movies (or anything, for that matter). However, I wanted to write about Albert Nobbs, a strange little period piece I recently saw on DVD, for the simple reason that I’d like to remember how it made me feel.

I won’t say unequivocally that I enjoyed this film; rather, it made a forceful impression. It stuck with me, so to speak. It had quite a few flaws, and it fell short in many ways. I suppose it frustrated me for all its unrealized potential and self-consciousness about wanting to avoid the tacky gender-bender stereotype, but it was also oddly touching in a way that I never expected.

Albert Nobbs is set in socially conservative 19^th century Ireland, when women were either sheltered to the extreme or left to fend for themselves as best as they could, depending on their socioeconomic status. The eponymous character, played by a shockingly convincing Glenn Close, is ostensibly a waiter in an upscale Dublin hotel catering to the badly behaved super-rich. As a waiter, Albert is efficient, punctual, meticulous, and discreet. As a man, he is reserved and taciturn, somewhat of an enigma to the other members of the hotel’s staff. When Albert is forced to share a room for one night with a migrant laborer named Mr. Page, we and his new roommate discover that Albert is actually a woman (surprise!). Luckily for Albert, crisis is averted by the revelation that the new confidant is also a woman disguised as a man, which leads to a shared bond of trust and much commiserating over the complications of living as the opposite gender. Upon learning that Mr. Page is married to a woman, Albert decides that, if Mr. Page can do it, Albert can also find a wife to assuage his loneliness. He designates a maid named Helen—who already has an alcoholic boyfriend named Joe--as the object of his affection, and proceeds to court her. This courting is to the severe detriment of Albert’s hard-earned savings, as Joe and Helen have devised a plain to exploit Albert’s solicitations in order to fund their journey to America. Meanwhile, Albert is busy striving to make his fantasy of operating his own tobacco shop, with Helen at his side, a reality. Things start to go awry when Joe gets Helen pregnant. Albert recognizes that Joe is a hit-it-and-quit-it sort of lad, and tries to warn Helen, but Helen overtly rejects Albert. Helen reports back to Joe, who drunkenly starts a fight, prompting Albert to intervene in Helen’s defense. Albert gets his head knocked against a wall for his trouble. At some point during the kerfuffle, Albert quietly returns to his bedroom and is found dead in his bed the next morning, presumably of an intracranial bleed. Soon after Albert’s death, Mr. Page returns to the hotel to find that Helen and her baby have been abandoned by Joe, just as Albert predicted. The movie ends ambiguously with Mr. Page, now a widower, implying that he will look after Helen as a sort of homage to Albert.

Critics have unanimously agreed that the strength of the film originates from the performances of the actors, particularly Glenn Close, and not from the plot. I don’t necessarily agree. I thought the story had a lot of potential as a study in becoming what we despise as a means to avert rejection and failure. Albert, who was the illegitimate child of a mother with some means, was cast out on to the street after the death of her mother and subsequently raped by a group of strangers.  In order to survive, she dressed as a boy and found work as a waiter, rather than continue to be vulnerable as a girl with no family and no prospects. However, she continued to live as a man for thirty years, which suggests that she eventually began to self-identify as Albert Nobbs. Albert, traumatized by rejection and shame, is essentially hiding from himself, creating a new life in which he is able to protect and provide for someone the way that nobody had ever done for him. Similarly, Albert’s competition for Helen’s affections is a handsome bad boy with an abusive, alcoholic father he loathes. He appears to have every intention of doing right by Helen and marrying her, but in the end, his demons win the battle and he continues his father’s legacy, becoming a violent drunk who shirks his responsibilities. Joe, like Albert, inadvertently transforms into that which he had vilified. I think this theme could have been explored more thoroughly, as it's a rather intriguing notion that rings true to life. 

It almost goes without saying that Glenn Close gave a truly outstanding performance as Albert. It can’t have been easy to play a woman playing a man—particularly with a common sort of British accent—but Close positively transformed into the character and gave Albert an awkward vulnerability that was mesmerizing to observe. I was astounded to learn that Close didn’t win an Academy Award for this remarkable performance. The lovely man-boy who played Joe also delivered a delightfully subtle turn, at once aggressively masculine and irreverently boyish. This movie boasts some genuinely solid actors and actresses that make Albert’s trials feel extraordinarily personal.

At the end of the day, I have no idea what to feel about Albert Nobbs. It was just uncomfortable enough to inspire me to ponder it weeks after watching the film, without being so uncomfortable to make me say, “What the F did I just watch?” (I’m talking about you there, A History of Violence.) I was certainly left wanting to know more about Albert; I felt that his abrupt death was unsatisfying and anticlimactic. I definitely felt a sense of emotional dry heaving with this film. There was something wanting to get out, but never quite yielded the catharsis that I expected.