The Danish Girl – Review

Eddie Redmayne gave one of the finest performances I’ve ever seen last year in Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything. While The Danish Girl is far from perfect, it is at least another opportunity for Redmayne to deliver another award-worthy portrayal that required a great amount of sensitivity and confidence.

The Danish Girl follows Danish landscape artist Einar Wegener’s realisation that he is a woman trapped in a man’s body. His wife, struggling portrait artist Gerda (Alicia Vikander), asks him to pose as a woman at a party. What begins as a fun game between them becomes a crisis as Einar’s female alter-ego Lili becomes who he is comfortable being, and who he feels he is really meant to be.

Redmayne is a joy to watch. His transformation begins awkwardly and subtly, but from the very beginning we see a man who isn’t entirely comfortable with himself, or with his wife. Though he is initially resistant to being Lili in public, she quickly becomes the dominant personality, and we see a person who’s confident, fluid, and natural in her actions.

The film delivers its message powerfully, and we get a real sense of how agonising it must feel to be trapped inside a body that you feel doesn’t belong to you. What’s even more grim is how terrifying it must have been to be told repeatedly that you’re delusional, even insane, because your identity doesn’t match the one assigned at birth. And when that’s all society tells you, it must have been a struggle to hold onto what you believe instead of just accepting that maybe you are crazy.

Potent shots were chosen to support this theme. My favourite was a moment when Einar visits a brothel and imitates the movements and gestures of a prostitute. We see both characters juxtaposed in a way that reinforces the duality Einar feels while also lending an intense display of discovery as Einar sees his body as a female one.

The film is also bolstered by an excellent performance by Alicia Vikander. Through her we see the dilemma of losing one’s husband by letting them accept their new identity, or keeping him but forcing him to live a lie and never be comfortable in his own skin. Though the leads have great chemistry and their relationship is convincing, the tension between them never rises to a threatening level.

This was the film’s main issue. Though it was nice to see Gerda accepting her husband’s wish to change her identity, I would have liked a more compelling dose of conflict to drive us through the second act. Instead, we are shown some odd subplots that didn’t quite gel with the rest of the story. It seemed that in a desperate effort to avoid the dreaded second act sag, it actually caused one by detracting from the sharp character story and bloating the film. And if you want to argue that the film tells a true story, they already took enough liberties in its adaptation that a few more for the sake of increased tension would have been harmless.

The third act also suffers from a horrid moment of disorientation when it isn’t at all made clear whether a pivotal event had even occurred, and for a few scenes I was genuinely confused as to how the story had progressed. For a moment I even thought the ambiguity was intentional, but later the story went on assuming we knew exactly what had happened.

My other issue is that, as with Tom Hooper’s previous two films The King’s Speech and Les Miserables, The Danish Girl reeks heavily of “Oscar bait”, if you’re the sort to believe in and be critical of the term (for me that’s a story for another time). But let’s be honest, you already knew that before you bought a ticket.

In the end, I enjoyed The Danish Girl, and it’s worth seeing if only to see the stellar performances from Redmayne and Vikander. The themes are relevant and the film does them justice, so if this interests you then you’ll have a good time with The Danish Girl, and perhaps won’t be troubled by its struggle with pacing towards the conclusion.