Film Review: The Danish Girl (2015)

“Is there something you’d like to tell me?
‘Is there something you’d like to know'”

Though it is the striking image of Eddie Redmayne as transgender pioneer Lili Elbe that dominates the publicity for this film, it is actually Alicia Vikander who emerges as the star of The Danish Girl. As Gerda Wegener, a mildly successful painter in mid-1920s Copenhagen, her emotional journey as a woman coming to terms with her husbandโ€™s Einarโ€™s realisation that sheโ€™s a transgender woman offers the filmโ€™s most fully rounded character and in Vikanderโ€™s hands, a sense of raw, unpredictable emotion that is gorgeous to watch as the very limits of her tolerance and understanding are tested.

After a year where transgender issues came to the fore, it seems only natural that a film about Elbe, one of the first known recipients of sex reassignment surgery, should be an apparent front-runner for this yearโ€™s award season. At the same time though, one canโ€™t help but wish that Tom Hooperโ€™s film hadnโ€™t been made with two eyes fixed on the Academy Awards. His glossy and ultimately quite superficial approach โ€“ based on David Ebershoffโ€™s novel which is a fictionalised version of Liliโ€™s life โ€“ thus feels like a missed opportunity, as artificial an image as Caitlyn Jennerโ€™s Annie Leibovitz-assisted cover. 

This isnโ€™t to deny some sterling work from Redmayne as the questioning Einar, first innocuously placed into stockings as a replacement model for his wife then progressing into sexual experimentation in a happy marriage, to creating a female persona โ€“ Lili โ€“ at his wifeโ€™s instigation, in which he feels increasingly comfortable, ultimately to the point of no return. Redmayne is at his best when developing Liliโ€™s demeanour and physical behaviour, observing woman around him and adopting mannerisms to flesh out the personality so long denied to her.

His Lili suffers a little from not having a strong supporting character to bounce off aside from Gerda though. Ben Whishaw as a willing suitor is given little to do, Sebastian Koch (recently very good as Otto in the latest series of Homeland) only a tad more as his surgeon. By contrast, Matthias Schoenaertsโ€™ Hans, though an old friend of Einarโ€™s, connects beautifully with Vikanderโ€™s intensity, offering the ideal counterbalance to Gerdaโ€™s turmoil as her professional life takes off unexpectedly. You can also spot Henry Pettigrew, Nancy Crane, a saucy Nicola Sloane and Issy van Randwyck in blink and miss โ€˜em cameos. 

But Lucinda Coxonโ€™s screenplay just doesnโ€™t delve deeply enough below the surface and Hooper seems too content to just show us the physical transformation of Lili. Too many simpering looks and fluttered eyelashes thus undermine the gravitas of the story as it winds to the possibilities of groundbreaking surgery and Alexandre Desplatโ€™s beautiful but overinsistent score robs the film of any subtlety that might have remained. Adding in the remove from reality that the source material provides, one is โ€“ unsurprisingly – left with a sanitised Hollywood version of not just Liliโ€™s life but trans issues at large. 

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