Well, awards season is certainly here and the latest release seems perfectly suited to the Oscar race. It features a pedigreed cast and filmmakers and is based on the life of a real person, Lili Elbe. The Danish Girl is a fictionalized account of the first person to undergo gender reassignment surgery. It’s certainly a noble attempt that is beautifully produced, although it isn’t quite the success many would anticipate.
Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) and his wife Greda (Alicia Vikander) are emerging artists living in Copenhagen in the 1920s. As part of a prank, Einer and his wife decide to dress him as a woman for a social function. Discovering that he feels far more comfortable as a female, the husband struggles to embrace his true self, dressing up and sneaking out without his wife’s knowledge and renaming himself Lily Elbe. While Greda attempts to salvage their relationship (even using him as the subject of many of her works), the two find their marriage fracturing as he begins to consider gender reassignment surgery.
It’s a bold story that includes challenging roles for the actors. While the talented cast generally do fine, there are a few problems. For such an intimate and personal story, there’s a certain grandiose delivery of the material. At times, it feels like we’re watching a play and that the performers are delivering the big emotional beats to the back row of the theater. Frankly, there are several moments with Redmayne that come across as over-baked.
Vikander has more to do as the wife struggling to cope with the dramatic change in her husband. She’s tasked with presenting the psychological toll of her loved one transforming and she does well with the material. It’s a situation that hasn’t really been captured in this much detail in the past and this makes the movie interesting as a result. Several of the sequences involving the title character being institutionalized and forced to endue horrible treatments to cure the so-called “condition” are also effectively rendered.
The film’s sets and costuming are impressive and the technical elements are also remarkable. Director Tom Hooper (Les Miserables) uses deep focus in a striking way. Even a standard, minimally dressed studio is captured with wide angles, presenting great depth and making a strong visual impression. Alexandre Desplat’s score is quite pretty and also helps add some sadness and depth to the story.
If only the film itself wasn’t trying quite so hard. Everyone involved is obviously doing their best to bring an important subject to light (and win an award doing so). It just seems as if it may have fared even better had it dialed things down a bit and made the smaller, introspective moments less theatrical in their presentation. The Danish Girl is a good movie with its heart in the right place, but never quite reaches the emotional heights that it should.