POINTS: 5
First of all, The Danish Girl is a well-meaning film. You should bear that in mind. Then, I guess it may even help to gain some sort of an understanding of some — very few — aspects of what the male to female transgender transition process is like. At least to uninformed, conservative, and usually older folks. So, in that regard, you could say it’s functional to a certain degree. It boasts a politically correct, sensitive, emphatic gaze towards its characters and it is careful enough — too careful — as not to wallow in their suffering.
And that’s one of the substantial problems of Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl: not only has it reduced a complex and often painful issue to a conveniently simplistic affair with few layers and little existential suffering, but it has also changed essential facts about the real life story of Danish artist Lili Elbe (Eddie Redmayne), the first known transgender woman to undergo sexual-reassignment surgery. For that matter, it also takes opportune liberties to portray her devoted wife, Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander), who lovingly accompanied her husband Einar until he became Lili, every step of the way. And to tell their unique love story too.
Of course, The Danish Girl is a fictional account of reality and as such it can take liberties. But in this case, the liberties taken are too handy to create an easier to digest product, a somewhat sanitized version that leaves out of the picture much of the intrinsically distressing, troublesome nature of the whole affair. No wonder it’s been nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Actor and Best Actress.
As film critic Diego Trerotola clearly puts it in his thought-provoking article on the film recently published in the supplement Soy (Página/12), in both Hooper’s film and David Ebershoff’s eponymous novel which the film loosely adapts, Wegener is depicted as a heterosexual woman, when in fact she was openly bisexual and very happy about it. Also, once in Paris, she and her trans partner Lili had a joyful open relationship, which is totally wiped out in the film. To be more precise, according to Hooper, Gerda’s sole, everlasting love was Einar/Lili.
Last, but by no means least, in the film Lili undergoes two surgeries: one to remove male genitalia, and then a vaginoplasty. In real life, she had five surgeries, the last one being a uterus transplant, which didn’t work. The real Lili wanted to be a mum, too. So, in The Danish Girl, Lili’s real groundbreaking journey as a transgender pioneer is quite shorter and considerably uneventful.
Another substantial problem is the director’s penchant for inert pictorial compositions rather than lively and cinematic ones. Unfortunately, Hooper’s sense of pictorial composition is nothing like Kubrick’s in Barry Lyndon, for instance, which blends in with true cinematic splendour.
If you remember The King’s Speech and Les Miserables, then it shouldn’t come as a surprise that The Danish Girl is overly stylish and filled with polished, lush cinematography, stately production design, out-of-this-world costumes, and an alluring musical score. It all looks so overwhelmingly gorgeous that you wonder how the human drama of the characters is going to fit in.
Actually, we are talking about melodrama rather than arid drama, which by definition is not necessarily a bad choice for this type of material — just remember Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s harrowing In a Year with 13 Moons (1978), which follows the last days in the life of a struggling transsexual. Of course, Hooper is no Fassbinder, but we already knew that. But the kind of melodrama The Danish Girl goes for is very minor: predictable Hollywood stuff with a shallow approach always afraid to provoke stirring emotions and contradictory feelings in viewers. Once again, we are not talking about, say, William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939) — not by a long shot.
And then there are the performances. Alicia Vikander does a very good job as Gerda: she’s supportive when necessary, a companion always, furious when disappointed, and at odds when in crisis. In a sense, she’s the true protagonist of the film since her character is better explored than that of Lili, played by Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne, whom you surely remember from The Theory of Everything. As Stephen Hawking, he was quite convincing. As Lili, he’s not. No matter how hard he tries, what you see is a pale copy of what a transgender woman is like. It’s played by the motions. It’s formulaic. It’s all just too cute for its own good. Like the film itself.
Production notes
The Danish Girl (2015). Directed by Tom Hooper. Written by Lucinda Coxon, based on the novel by David Ebershoff. With: Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander, Ben Whishaw, Sebastian Koch, Amber Heard, Matthias Schoenaerts. Cinematography by Danny Cohen. Editing by Melanie Oliver. Running time: 120 minutes.
