Just the Ticket #40: Crappy Anniversary

Welcome to the 40th issue of Just the Ticket!

After a week that included such fun things as still not having a steady paying job, finding out from the DOL that I need new glasses (which cost money), and having a leaky water heater (which costs more money to replace), I finally got to watch Albert Nobbs, the tragic tale of a delusional woman (Glenn Close, Damages) who decides to become a man in order to escape her history of sexual abuse and better her life in 19th century Ireland.
I say delusional not because I disagree with her choice, but because she is a creature akin to Michael C. Hall's heroic serial killer on Dexter. While only one is a murderer, both are people committed to living in a skin they find uncomfortable but necessary, both have fantastically high aspirations for the future even though they are still in the process of discovering who or what they are now, and both give minimal attention to what the consequences will be if they are found out.
It makes for a complex character, to be sure. When Albert and her fellow woah-man (Janet McTeer, who also worked with Close on Damages) decide to try life as women in one scene, they are by then so set as characters that you feel their awkwardness. They are not women pretending to be men who need a break from the lie, they feel like men uncomfortable with pretending to be women. You get that sense of conviction even more so from Albert when McTeer's Hubert Page asks her name: "Albert." "No, your real name." "Albert." While the Page character's choice arose out of gender identity issues and she acknowledges her past life as a woman, "Albert" was born of tragedy and a desperate breed of survivalism that has caused her to block out life before becoming a man, and her desperation bleeds through with every decision she makes.
But a character in search of herself also invites a kind of writing and thought process that require coincidence as a plot motivator. Albert's fellow woah-man with a life worth coveting, the above-mentioned Hubert Page, just so happens to be there to support the object of Albert's affections (a maid at the hotel where Albert works, played by Alice In Wonderland's Mia Wasikowska) when Albert dies. Remember when I said the British have a way of making the main character's death into a happy ending? It's like rain on your wedding day, it's a free ride when you've already paid, it's the good advice that you just didn't take. It isn't "Ironic," it's coincidence, and it's one of the uncreative scriptwriter's favorite go-to's when a resolution becomes impossible. Another way to circumvent the uncreative is with a little math:

Below average movie
+ powerful performance by Glenn Close
+ I didn't fall asleep
= C+

And yeah, I really do think. Stay tuned for tomorrow's issue, when I review the all-and-nothing thriller, Man On A Ledge.