The point about The Danish Girl, of course, is that it has two Danish heroines - and that one of them started life as a Danish boy. Adapted by Lucinda Coxon from David Ebershoff’s novel, Tom Hooper’s film retells a true-life story: that of painter Einar Wegener, who underwent a pioneering gender reassignment operation in the 1930s to become Lili Elbe. Einar/Lili is played by Eddie Redmayne, who is certain to reap plentiful laurels in the forthcoming awards season, with another role – following his Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything – about a slow process of physical and psychological transformation. And no doubt this sumptuously mounted, high-minded and unabashedly Oscar-baiting undertaking will overall emerge dripping with honours. But well-meaning and polished as it is, The Danish Girl is a determinedly mainstream melodrama that doesn’t really offer new perspectives its theme; and in the year of Caitlyn Jenner, it’s a theme on which mainstream audiences are ready for more trenchant insight.
Cinematographer Danny Cohen sets up the exquisite visual tone at the start with a series of atmospheric, deeply painterly landscape shots - that turn out indeed to be vistas painted by Einar, who in mid-1920s Copenhagen is making a name as an artist. Einar enjoys a highly sexual, loving marriage to portrait painter Gerda (Alicia Vikander). One day, she asks him to wear stockings as a leg stand-in for her portrait of a ballerina friend. Einar’s dawning discovery of his inner woman is treated somewhat like a superhero origin story: the stockings episode and a scene involving Gerda’s new silk negligee are this film’s equivalents of Peter Parker’s spider-bite moment. It’s Gerda who first encourages Einar to cross-dress in public and attend a party as Lili. Here, Lili acquires an admirer (Ben Whishaw) and the film nearly takes an awkward tumble into Charley’s Aunt territory (“You’re different from most girls”). There are more than a few cliches ahead: the couple visit Paris, where we’re treated to art-world soirées crammed with Central Casting demi-monde. And when Einar consults assorted doctors, we get a montage of bespectacled and bow-tied quacks and shrinks. Things take a more sober turn when Einar finally becomes Lili under the aegis of an enlightened doctor (Sebastian Koch, one of the more solid performances here).
The story is as much Gerda’s as Einar/Lili’s, but the script strains mightily at the start to establish her strong-woman credentials, notably when she lays down the law to a besotted male portrait sitter: “It’s hard for a man to be looked at by a woman, to... (beat) submit to a woman’s gaze.” While you know you’re watching blue-chip actors at work, the leads’ performances don’t carry much dramatic subtlety. Vikander sports the same archly knowing English accent as in Testament of Youth, and she’s over-emphatic and mannered throughout. Offering more light and shade, Redmayne is undeniably affecting – and sports an exquisite swan’s neck in those 1920s/30s frocks. But his coy grins, so effective in The Theory of Everything, are worked relentlessly here. However he does play intriguingly on the sense that, in both genders, his character is always performing, creating a persona – indeed, using gestures to be a figure in a painting.
But it’s that painterly finish that finally drains the life out of The Danish Girl, a film that smacks more of the coffee table than the operating table. Despite what we’re told about the danger and extremity of the untested medical process that Einar undergoes, there’s little sense here of the corporeal, or of pain. It’s as if the body has been written out of Lili’s story.
