There is something so incredibly...confounding about The Danish Girl, Tom Hooper’s fine take on the story of transsexual Danish landscape painter Einar Wegener, one the first men ever to undergo operations to become a woman back in the 1930s.
For one, the second-in-a-row showcase of Eddie Redmayne’s Academy Award-winning talent hardly belongs exclusively to him. It Girl Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina) co-stars opposite the Theory of Everything revelation, and while she is being campaigned in the Supporting Actress category this awards season (for her leading-caliber turn as Gerda Wegener, the unwavering portraitist-wife of Einar), the film is just has hers, if not more than Redmayne’s.
Vikander brought it. She is in The Danish Girl to win it (gf came to play!), and she easily steals the film away from her leading man. Like, she is the one referred to as the Danish girl, this story is that much about her (too).
Not that Redmayne doesn’t show up. His nuanced, if shtick-y dual portrayal of a loving husband in chaos with himself, and, later, of Lili Elbe, a blossoming woman misunderstood by a society that absolutely thought her gender identity crisis was a perversion but who was nevertheless bravely determined to live as her truest self, is the stuff of Oscar-nomination dreams.
Lucinda Coxon’s adaptation of the David Ebershoff novel that gives the film its name and marching orders, however, translates into something that draws a mostly by-the-numbers performance from Redmayne, for he is completed unaided by Hooper’s penchant for tight close-ups. Can’t the Academy Award-winning director of The King’s Speech allow his talent some room to breathe?
He really should because his style, which arguably worked on an ensemble akin to that of Les Misérables – ergo the praise lavished upon Anne Hathaway, for instance – can grow tiresome fast when imposed onto one or two actors. Worse, it can betray their bag o’ tricks.
It is aggroying to see how Redmayne clicks in and out between Einar and Lili in certain scenes (he does this blink-y, focus-y thing...). It is almost as distracting as having to have to accept the hair and make-up that Vikander sports in the film. Her wig is just so obvious, and during one of Lili’s earliest, most pivotal scenes, the actress looks or is lit to look as if she just stepped out of the spray tan booth.
I mean, WTF.
That Vikander manages to transcend these poor production values is a testament to her commitment to her work and, perhaps, to her smart recognition that the role of Gerda Wegener was a starmaker.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. So what is this about Gerda and Lili having an early scene together, how did that go?
See, the film spins its yarn in a matter-of-fact way. We meet Einar and Gerda. They’re artists living in Copenhagen; he’s the toast of the town, while she’s the struggling artist in the family. They’re super-tuned to each other until one day, she asks him to pose for her, as a woman, so she may finish the piece on which she’s been working (the model, a bon-vivant-dancer-friend of theirs winningly portrayed by Magic Mike XXL’s Amber Heard, is running late, you see). The seemingly innocuous moment awakens something in Einar, though – something very real he knows has been dormant.
Long story short, Gerda is not against having Lili around the house or the studio: Lili, with whom Gerda speaks and essentially girlfriends around town for fun, turns out to be quite good for her business (Copenhagen and then Paris fall for her portraits). Alas, Einar begins finding it increasingly more difficult to tame Lili’s desires. He tests his and her own boundaries with a dalliance with a suitor played by SPECTRE’s Ben Whishaw, and for the second half of the film, lives out loud as Lili (well, as loud as he can be in the privacy of his old home with his trying-to-be-understanding-and-supporting wife).
The Danish Girl deftly explores the conflict that Lili brings into Einar’s and, especially, Gerda’s life, yet it is structured in such a traditional manner that mirrors more “classic” propositions. Much as in Redmayne’s last awards-baiting offering, a love triangle of sorts develops when Matthias Schoenaerts enters the scene as a childhood friend of Einar’s who takes a shine to not only Lili but Gerda as well. It eclipses the anguish and abandonment that colors the dissolution of the Wegeners’ marriage, but it discreetly helps bridge Gerda’s own transition from wife to friend to leftover. From beginning to end, she comes off the most fully realized.
Ultimately, the film falls on this side of working thanks to Vikander, albeit in a minor way, as far as filmmaking is concerned, and a major way, as far as telling an Important Story to Tell is concerned. The transgender movement is hot right now, and rightfully so, so it is imperative that more and more people witness what it was like once upon a time. Einar and Lili, they put themselves through the ringer to try to live in the authentic way the lot of us take for granted.
For that, this one deserves attention.
Just try to forget that Nicole Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow were once attached to star. That will trip you up for a while...if you let it.
My Rating ***
Photo: Focus Features.
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