Albert Nobbs is Glenn Close’s brainchild. She stars in it, she produced and heavily financed it, and she co-scripted it with Irish novelist John Banville. The shocking scarcity of good roles for older actresses in Hollywood is well known – it seems Close did the logical thing and created one for herself. Close plays Albert, a waiter in an 1890s Dublin hotel who has a secret: she is a woman living as a man. It started as a way to find work and protect herself from sexual predators; it is now, simply, who she is. Albert hides in plain sight behind the dual roles of male person and efficient servant. But this doesn’t leave a lot of room for a personality of her own – or for connecting with others.

Close captures Albert’s awkwardness with sensitivity. Unfortunately, this torturous oddness becomes the whole point of the film, which feels like a missed opportunity. Albert is a subsistence worker with a capricious boss in an environment of high unemployment, and that’s at least as dangerous to her security as her secret is. However, the desperations of poverty, which made for such gripping cinema in, say, Buñuel’s Los Olvidados, De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, or Ray’s Apu trilogy, never disturb the polished costume-drama surface here. Close and Banville’s script is packed with sentimental “types” – the rich sadist, the abandoned young mother – but it misses chance after chance to raise the stakes. There are stand-out moments, such as Albert fretting over sums to keep her sweetheart (Mia Wasikowska) in chocolates and stockings long enough to persuade her to wed; or a young man desperate for work who is given one night to fix a recalcitrant boiler, and faces it down like a beast of myth. But the drama never really coheres. At one point, a character who ought to know better storms, “I don’t know why people live such miserable lives.” It’s the economy, stupid.

Given that Albert’s so driven, her yearnings remain strangely inert. It’s never clear what she wants from others, or why she wants a wife at all. The contrast with the genuine, loving lesbian marriage of her friends Hubert (Janet McTeer) and Cathleen (Bronagh Gallagher) points up this weakness all the more. The problem, I think, is the film’s misplaced obsession with Albert’s “oddness.” By the rules of the class-bound, misogynistic society she lives and works in, yes, she is a weirdo. But when she’s among friends – people who also don’t fit in, and who’ve had to be secretive to survive – she doesn’t seem so weird after all.