Alicia Vikander (Ex-Machina) continues her prolific year as a very impressive actress and Eddie Redmayne follows up his Oscar-winning role in The Theory of Everything with The Danish Girl. Redmayne plays Einar Wegener, a landscape artist in 1926 Copenhagen, who went on to become one of the first recipients of transgender surgery. Redmayne, like the film itself, works primarily on the surface, leaving any representation of Einar’s interior self at best impressionistic and at worst, virtually blank.
Einar begins his morphing into Lili Elbe after an afternoon as a last-minute replacement model on behalf of his wife Gerda Wegener’s own artistic endeavors as a portrait artist. Once he tries on female garments, he has feelings surface that will come to dominate the rest of his life. Apart from his self-discovery and his evolving marriage, Einar must face the harshness of that time in history. He will be castigated as a schizophrenic and worse until finding a doctor who had just begun work in the previously unheard of surgery. Instead of director Todd Hooper giving Redmayne a character and a script that goes inside his dilemma, he and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon come up with a lot of exterior sheen. Much of the film’s art direction may contain gorgeous detail, but it seems mostly for naught. Redmayne is good at lingering glances, posture fluctuations, and coquettish smiles, but he does little in providing a sense of what his character is actually thinking.
If one bothers fact-checking The Danish Girl, the film’s central premise suffers greatly. The film’s focus is on Gerda’s resilience at maintaining loyalty to Einar, even as he, in effect, gradually disappears in front of her eyes. In real life, Einar and Gerda actually divorced and Gerda wasn’t around for the events portrayed in the film’s grandiose Hollywood ending, but was remarried and living in Italy. Sure, they were together 26 years (much longer than the film would have you believe) and a biopic can take liberties as needed.
Yet if The Danish Girl already seems too sanitized, an additional problem is posed by the reality that Gerda was reportedly bisexual. Her actual paintings reflected this, while those in the film focus on a G-rated Lilli. That Gerda apparently carnally enjoyed Lili even after Einar’s metamorphosis, gives food for thought that this could have been a better film had it approached its subject from an alternative direction. It also certainly renders the sheet separating Gerda and Lili’s beds depicted in this film as narratively flimsy if not an affront to Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night.
As it stands, The Danish Girl is more Gerda’s film than Lili’s. To augment her victimization, the film includes the character Hans Axgil (Matthias Schoenaerts). He’s another fiction, an invention of novelist David Ebershoff, upon whose book the film is based. Just in case the viewer misses the point, Gerda comes to eventually reject Hans despite their mutually flirtatious interest in each other so she can run back to supporting Lili. At one point Hans calls her “The Danish Girl.” If I were Lili, I’d be furious I don’t even get to own the film’s title.