The Danish Girl

The Danish Girl tells the story of Lili Elbe, who in the late 1920's became one of the first known recipients of gender reassignment surgery. Part biopic and part fictionalized drama, and based on David Ebershoff’s novel of the same name, the film explores subject matter that rarely appears onscreen even in today’s culture, in which transgender issues are topics of everyday mainstream discourse. Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander) is a frustrated painter married to Einar (Eddie Redmayne), whose landscapes enjoy much greater acclaim than her portraits. One day, when a female model runs late for a session, Gerda asks her husband to dress up and stand in. Doing so awakens Einar's feminine identity, which he has repressed since childhood, and the painting Gerda produces unexpectedly launches her career to new levels of success. But Einar's transition to Lili proves deeply complicated for their marriage.

A period film about sexual and transgender politics featuring a unique love triangle between only two people, ought to be uniquely rich cinematic fodder. Sadly, the movie plays like every other stuffy and clichéd period biopic. Its shortcomings are especially conspicuous because the film arrives in the wake of what was perhaps the greatest year for the dubious genre, 2014. With the exception of Steve Jobs and Love and Mercy, the upward trend of well-told biopics seems to have come to a crashing halt. The Danish Girl, like Trumbo, Pawn Sacrifice, Legend, and most every other biographical film of 2015, feels like business as usual.

Just one year earlier, Redmayne won a Best Actor Oscar for playing Steven Hawking in The Theory of Everything, a movie which presented the life of an extraordinary man as seen from his wife's perspective. The unconventional narrative approach freed that film from many of the biopic’s stalest tropes, but repeated here, it already feels tired and shopworn. Perhaps that’s an unfair criticism, as I believe The Danish Girl was written before Jane Hawking’s memoir, which served as the basis for Theory. But Screenwriter Lucinda Coxon doesn’t focus her narrative in such a way that enables us to fully identify with either of the characters. Even more than Lili, Gerda is the Danish girl of the film's title, but we don't learn much about her as a person in her own right, beyond the context of her unusual marriage. The screenplay doesn’t push the material's inherent themes (love, confusion, and suffering) sufficiently far enough to make this tale anything more than comfortable, predictable, and utterly safe.

Coxon, who penned other British period chamber pieces including The Heart of Me and the BBC miniseries The Crimson Petal and the White, and director Tom Hooper might have created something truly bold if they had chosen to explore the true history of the Wegeners, rather than basing their fictionalized picture on a fictionalized novel. But ironically, freed from the constraint of historical veracity, the two don’t invent enough to make their film the least bit daring or risky.

Hooper delved more deeply when he worked in British TV, but since making the leap to features (The King's Speech, Les Misérables), he seems more interested in cosmetic details than in figuring out how to put real human emotions on the screen. Here, he relies too much on Redmayne’s skills to telegraph Einar’s internal struggles to the audience. Unfortunately, the actor proves unable to fully disappear into this role the way he immersed himself in his portrayal of Hawking. Since The Theory of Everything, Redmayne has made just one other film, Jupiter Ascending, in my estimation the worst picture of 2015. In that movie, Redmayne reveled in campy overacting, and though he's seriously applying his craft in this case, the performance still tends to laps into self-conscious “Master Thespian” territory. In his defense, Lili is a more difficult role to pull off than Steven Hawking, since there’s no living model for the character. And since this is a movie about artifice, perception, and artistic representation - Lili herself is, at first, a kind of performance by Einar – we're especially sensitive to the actors at work. 

Thankfully, Alicia Vikander is in fine form as Gerda. She's had a terrific year in films like Testament of Youth, Ex Machina, Seventh Son, Burnt, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., underwhelming movies that were worth seeing because she appeared in them. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of The Danish Girl, which squanders a worthy story by leaving too many of its themes and ideas undeveloped. It begins as riveting exploration of gender identity and marriage, and devolves into one of those disease/illness movies you’d see on TV in the early ‘90s.