The Danish Girl
Directed by: Tom Hooper
Written by: Lucinda Coxon - Based on the novel by David Ebershoff
Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander, Ben Whishaw, Sebastian Koch, Amber Heard, Matthias Schoenaerts
Biography/Drama - 120 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 23 Nov 2015
Written by: Lucinda Coxon - Based on the novel by David Ebershoff
Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander, Ben Whishaw, Sebastian Koch, Amber Heard, Matthias Schoenaerts
Biography/Drama - 120 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 23 Nov 2015
Denmark and the Danish people are known for their social tolerance and progressivism, but the knowledge and acceptance of gender identity and fluidity in the 1920s was as foreign an idea as you could come up with. Surely, there were those who identified as the opposite sex, but even if they could somehow explain it in those terms, they buried the truth as their deepest, darkest secret. Even if the individual stood up to tell the truth, there was nothing to be done about it, no hormone therapy and certainly no gender reassignment surgery. Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl explores the first such person to undergo a sex-change operation, artist Einar Wegener, pardon, I mean Lili Elbe.
Issues surrounding the transgendered are prominent topics in today’s pop culture. Amazon’s Transparent sweeps television award shows, Laverne Cox catapulted to stardom through HBO’s Orange is the New Black, and there is the entire industry surrounding Caitlyn Jenner. Not so long ago, the most famous transgendered character was Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs (1991), not the most sympathetic portrayal. Even though it may appear to be a zeitgeist film, Lucinda Coxon wrote the screenplay long before the transgendered community achieved center stage. Coxon adapted David Ebershoff’s novel of the same name, published in 2000, a fictional interpretation of Elbe’s own 1933 memoir, Man into Woman.
Issues surrounding the transgendered are prominent topics in today’s pop culture. Amazon’s Transparent sweeps television award shows, Laverne Cox catapulted to stardom through HBO’s Orange is the New Black, and there is the entire industry surrounding Caitlyn Jenner. Not so long ago, the most famous transgendered character was Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs (1991), not the most sympathetic portrayal. Even though it may appear to be a zeitgeist film, Lucinda Coxon wrote the screenplay long before the transgendered community achieved center stage. Coxon adapted David Ebershoff’s novel of the same name, published in 2000, a fictional interpretation of Elbe’s own 1933 memoir, Man into Woman.
Nearly 100 years before Caitlyn Jenner, Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) knew he was born into the wrong body. Growing up confused, marrying fellow artist Gerda (Alicia Vikander), and enjoying a respectable amount of local celebrity for his landscapes, Einar gradually discovers he is actually a she, and wants most of all to identify as a woman. At first playing along with the joke, Gerda sketches Einar dressed up as Lili and those paintings became quite famous in their own right. Covering up the subject’s remarkable resemblance, Lili was passed off as Einar’s cousin and not Einar in drag; imagine the scandal.
Becoming evident to Gerda in bits and pieces, she learns Lili is here to stay and her husband is most likely gone for good. Willing to help Lili knowing full well she is destroying her marriage, Gerda acts against her own self-interest as she somewhat reluctantly and then whole-heartedly encourages Lili. Gerda has her own ambition; she’s a strong woman searching for professional success separate from her husband’s in a decade not known for making room for a female’s drive and equality. Their entire household was decades ahead of society in terms of female egalitarianism and almost a full century ahead of gender identity concerns.
The paintings in the film are not the actual Gerda Wegener paintings due to their lack of resemblance to Eddie Redmayne, but they are correct in all other aspects rather than the face. Director Tom Hooper, who won an Oscar for The King’s Speech, wanted as much authenticity as he good get. He filmed in Copenhagen, casted a Scandinavian to play Gerda, but settled on painting reproductions for the actual art. Knowing he wanted to direct The Danish Girl long before it was green lit, Hooper gave Redmayne the script while he was still wrangling the massive musical Les Miserables. This was before Redmayne earned his own Oscar for The Theory of Everything. Director Lana, formerly Larry, Wachowski, the co-creator of The Matrix trilogy, tutored Redmayne on the set of Jupiter Ascending about gender identity issues in the 1920s and teaching the word ‘transgender’ did not even exist. The medical profession diagnosed homosexuality and schizophrenia and recommended radiation, lobotomies, and strait jackets as cures.
While the story of Lili Elbe is both fascinating and gorgeously shot by Danny Cohen, Oscar nominated for The King’s Speech, even though he relies on the same establishing shots outside the Wegener’s apartment, The Danish Girl feels tedious. In repetitive scenes, Redmayne stares into the mirror or out the window and cries. After the transformation of clothing and the addition of wigs and makeup, Lili doesn’t have much to do. Her speaking time plummets and she is shuttled off into the corner to nervously smile and nod. Gerda is the more intriguing character of the duo as she struggles to come to terms with the loss of her husband and how to help him/her. Vikander has been a revelation in 2015 bombarding movie screens in Ex Machina, Testament of Youth, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., but The Danish Girl might be her strongest work yet. The film as a whole is not as effective as the cast’s performance, yet it is a story worth learning about, particularly in today’s times.
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