The pleasure of a film like "The Remains of the Day" or a television series like "Upstairs Downstairs" comes from stripping away the starched collar of the class system to see the human commonality beneath. But in the strange melodrama "Albert Nobbs," what lies beneath is another lie.

Nobbs (Oscar nominee Glenn Close) is a live-in waiter at a posh hotel in 19th century Dublin. The guests know Nobbs as a fastidious, ginger-haired gentleman; yet Albert is actually Alma, an androgynous nonentity who has passed as a man for decades.

The double deception of suppressed personality and repressed sexuality could have been the basis for a rewarding character study, but after Albert meets a kindred spirit and dares to dream of a happy ending, her denial and naivete become too much to swallow.

When the hotel proprietor hires a house painter, the obsessively private Mr. Nobbs is forced to bunk with the boisterous stranger. But in this fractured fairy tale, Mr. Page turns out to be another cross-dresser (played by Academy Award nominee Janet McTeer). Page is happily married to a woman and encourages Nobbs to find a partner of her own, so asexual Albert shyly woos a lively hotel maid named Helen (Mia Wasikowska).

Helen is having an affair with a roughneck named Joe (Aaron Johnson), and when he encourages her to fleece the gentle suitor so they can move to America, it gives the stilted film some much-needed thrust. But it's not enough to generate sympathy for a protagonist who's such a cipher.

Despite a stagey script in which Albert voices her hopes out loud, we're never sure whether she's actually a lesbian, and Close, who has been grooming this project for 30 years, is expressionless behind prosthetic makeup that's more eerie than effective.

With a star so subservient to the uniform, "Albert Nobbs" is never less than a tidy feat — but never more than a shuttered window.

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"Albert Nobbs"

Two and a half stars (out of four) • Rating R • Run time 1:53 • Content Some sexuality, brief nudity and coarse language