•  BULLHEAD

•  ALBERT NOBBS

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By Roger Ebert 

"Bullhead" contains the elements for a simple but overwhelming personal tragedy. It also contains other elements that create a muddle. It's one of those films you have to reconstruct in your mind. It involves Jacky, a low-level Belgian farmer and criminal, who is paralyzed by fear and insecurity about his masculinity. Because he has easy access to testosterone and animal-growth hormones, he uses them to build muscle and body mass. The supplements have turned him into a raging bull.

I understand why "Bullhead" was one of this year's nominees for foreign film Oscar. I'm not sure it was one of best five in the running, but that goes with the territory. It impresses because of the pain, sadness and rage contained in the title performance by Flemish actor Matthias Schoenaerts, who bulked up for the role (without steroids), and seems ready to burst from his clothes and even his skin.

He had something happen to him when he was young. It happened on the very day he first took notice that girls have breasts. This was during a talk with his best friend Diederik (Jeroen Perceval), as they regarded the sister of a neighbor. It was one of those talks many children have in which the facts of life fall into place with a blinding insight. Yes, you know about such things in a distracted sort of incomplete way, because they aren't especially interesting to you. Then suddenly they become the most important things in your life.

As a boy, young Jacky is a handsome mophead with a sunny personality. On that day, everything changed. We meet the adult Jacky at the start of the film, we see him consumed by sudden angers and intimidating people for his uncle, who raises beef cattle. We learn about animal-growth hormone, which they use, and in his bathroom, we see a little refrigerator containing countless bottles, vials and syringes of such drugs. 

Jacky has become expert in their use. A casual conversation about their dangers indicates that he recklessly consumes what should be lethal self-dosages if he didn't have such a high resistance. He gobbles pills, stabs himself with needles, throws punches in the air like De Niro in "Raging Bull." He still maintains an obsession with the girl he was looking at on that fateful childhood day.

Because that day provided the engine driving his entire life, I'm not sure it was wise for writer-director Michael R. Roskam to delay it until a flashback halfway through. Something made this guy this way, we're thinking, but the flashback information causes us to rethink everything. Well, that's what flashbacks often do, but in "Bullhead," there's too much to rethink.

The movie reminded me of Michael Fassbender's masterful work in Steve McQueen's "Shame." Both characters allow their existence to center on their genitals. "Shame" is what Paul Schrader calls a Man in a Room movie, like "Raging Bull" or "American Gigolo," in which the hero's tormented existence is solitary. "Bullhead" introduces a plot involving Belgium's "hormone mafia," a police informer, two rival criminals, the childhood friends still around, a murder of a cop, a stolen car and two dim-witted Walloon auto mechanics, dumb and dumber. 

The result is a film more confusing than it needs to be. At its center is a man and his obsession, and the way hormone use has driven him out of control. That is more than enough. The one excellent aspect of the film is Matthias Schoenaerts' performance. We often follow him walking in a controlled lurch from side to side, as if merely walking is not enough of a challenge for him. We see his eyes, burning with pain. He speaks as if forcing out every word. 

Perhaps it was something he overheard on that day in childhood. Perhaps it was misunderstood comments from a crooked veterinarian about the effect of hormones on bulls. There is no need for him to be this crazed. The lack of testicles hasn't destroyed his life. This is the story of a man being eaten from within by chemicals. That alone would have been more than enough. I'm damned if I could follow the scheming involving the mechanics and those two sets of stolen auto tires.

By Roger Ebert 

I know a novel that begins: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Now here is one of the saddest movies I have ever seen, "Albert Nobbs." It is sad because a woman has chosen to lead her life in a way that is fearful and unnatural to her and must live every moment in dread.

As you must know by now, Albert Nobbs (Glenn Close in an Oscar-nominated turn) is not a man. She works as a butler and waiter in a 19th century Dublin hotel, where she dresses and passes as a man because a woman would not be hired for the job, and she needs the economic security. We can sympathize. But the pain she lives in isn't worth the money. Many people pass as members of the other sex for many reasons, but my impression is that for most of them, it answers a genuine emotional need.  

Albert Nobbs isn't happy being a man. I don't believe she's ever happy at all. There is something stiff and genderless about her, and we suspect she has no sexual experience and desires none. Her entire life is focused on economic security, and she lives in terror of being exposed. Regard her body language: shy, repressed, reclusive, trying to fade in and become invisible. 

The hotel is a Dublin crossroads for people of some means but no great distinction. It's run by the ebullient Mrs. Baker (Pauline Collins), who sails a jolly ship but as an employer is no paragon. Employees come and go, and although Albert is considered by everyone an odd fellow, she's still there. Homosexuality is not unknown in this establishment; Viscount Yarrell (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) checks in with a free-drinking crew and specifies an adjoining room for his friend. But Albert Nobbs isn't a homosexual of any description; life would be simpler if she were. 

One day, Hubert Page (Janet McTeer) arrives to do some house painting. Hubert is tall, lanky, smokes a lot, kids around, and is obviously (to our eyes) a woman. She gets by on personality and nerve. She quickly reads Albert, and in what must be the most astonishing moment of Albert's life to date, exposes her breasts and shares her secret. I wonder if that was the first time Albert realized she wasn't the only person who has ever passed for another sex. 

That opens the film's only scenes that give us some reason to hope for Albert. The two women spend a liberating day on the beach, and Hubert takes Albert home to her wife, Cathleen (played by Bronagh Gallagher with quiet calm and tact). It becomes clear, if it wasn't already, that Albert has only a sketchy idea of what men and women do with each other, what sex is, what marriage is. 

But she has a dream. She has her eye on a storefront that she believes would make a nice little tobacco shop. There would be a room in the back where tea would be served. And a room upstairs to, well, to share with a "wife." In an exercise of dismaying naivete, she imagines Helen (Mia Wasikow­ska), a young housemaid at the hotel, in this role. For Albert, it involves a business partnership, not a romance. 

This is such a brave performance by Glenn Close, who in making Albert so real, makes the character as pathetic and unlikable as she must have been in life. The film is based on a story by George Moore (1852-1933), an Irish realist writer who may have known some real-life parallels in Dublin. Close starred in an Off-Broadway production of a play based on it in 1982, and tried ever after to make it a film. The Hungarian director Istvan Szabo was attached to the project circa 2001, but now the film has been made with Rodrigo Garcia, whose sure touch with women characters can be seen in his "Nine Lives" and "Mother and Child."  

Close never steps wrong, never breaks reality. My heart went out to Albert Nobbs, the depth of whose fears are unimaginable. But it is Janet McTeer who brings the film such happiness and life as it has, because the tragedy of Albert Nobbs is that there can be no happiness in her life. The conditions she has chosen make it impossible.