Review of The Danish Girl (2015) by Blake P — 03 May 2016

"The Danish Girl" is an immaculately designed film whose biggest problem is its immaculate design. As it gets its drive from a subject matter that should be portrayed with torrid emotion and an unsafe texture, it isn't much fitting for everything to be so pristine, so mannered. It should be exploratory in its drama, vivid in its style - Douglas Sirkian depiction might have even sufficed - but it moves along with biopic inevitability that never gives it a sense of urgency. Its perfection is just a little too perfect.

Consider its source of interest, which, if you don't already know by now, is Lili Elbe, who was one of the first people to undergo sexual reassignment surgery. Portrayed in the film by Eddie Redmayne, we watch voyeuristically as Lili, born Einar Wegener, comes to realize her true gender identity. We first meet her in the early 1920s, when she still identifies as Einar and when she is married to Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander), a struggling portrait artist. An acclaimed landscape painter herself, Einar has long contended with her identity - so when Gerda innocently asks her husband to act as stand in for a female model for one of her works, she realizes that she can no longer hide who she really is.

At first, her insistence on dressing up at Lili is met with a smile by Gerda, who doesn't fully come to understand the realness of the situation until it's much too late. From there do we witness the dissolution of their marriage, the arrival of Hans Axgil (Matthias Schoenaerts), a childhood friend of Lili who's also attracted to Gerda, the romantic intrigue presented by Henrik (Ben Whishaw), who makes for the first man to be openly enamored with Lili, and Lili's eventually decision to have an unsuccessful sex change operation, with was experimental at the time.

What "The Danish Girl" lacks in immediacy it more than makes up for in performance: Redmayne and Vikander both give some of the best characterizations of the decade. As proven with his universally lauded turn in 2014's "The Theory of Everything," Redmayne is the Daniel Day-Lewis of his generation; Vikander (who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for "The Danish Girl"), by comparison, is an instant star possessing emotive panache akin to Marion Cotillard. Together, they're indisputably powerful, utilizing their remarkable artistic abilities to move us immeasurably. They give the finest performances of 2015.

So director Tom Hooper's ("The King's Speech," "Les Misérables") insistence on dressing it all up in an almost ghostly beautiful sheen is dissatisfying. Even worse are the historical inaccuracies present in the screenplay for sake of making everything more cinematic. Rather than capture the inherent struggles its real-life characters faced in their melancholic realities, it all seems romanticized for the purpose of making everything spotlessly tragic. Such is fine, I suppose, because "The Danish Girl" is effective and is visually enticing, the performances additionally wonderful. But I'm bothered by the fact that Hooper didn't trust that Lili Elbe's life was interesting enough to be told with accuracy. This is groundbreaking material, but only its most attractive, most intriguing aspects, are given the light of day. Much is fictionalized.

But I cannot deny the dominance "The Danish Girl" has over its audience. Indeed, being stirred by its emotional woes is impossible to resist; Redmayne, so exquisitely fragile, captures his character's tremendous vulnerability, and Vikander floors us as a wife tormented but nevertheless supportive of the changes in her husband. The film is a case of actors being better than the movie they're starring in - but when performers are this Earth-shattering, that's hardly a complaint.