There’s a scene in The Danish Girl in which a group of female shop assistants in 1920s Copenhagen are told by their supervisor that serving customers is a matter of performance. One new recruit gives a knowing smile, as well she might; for she is Lili Elbe, born a male named Einar Wegener, and knows a thing or two about playing a role. Based on the true story of a pioneering recipient of gender reassignment surgery, and on David Ebershoff’s book of the same name, Tom Hooper’s drama constantly emphasises the dimension of acting in gender identity – but too often in the film, performance blurs uneasily with pantomime.
In 2015, transgender themes and characters achieved their greatest media visibility yet: on TV, Transparent and BBC2’s Boy Meets Girl; in the cinema, Tangerine and the Australian drama 52 Tuesdays; in the real world (or at least, that hazy zone where it intersects with planet Vanity Fair), Caitlyn Jenner. While arguably the most mainstream-friendly of such phenomena, The Danish Girl is manifestly serious in intent. Yet it’s a laboured, glossy affair in which the complexity and challenge of Lili’s process of becoming are buried under a glaze of sumptuous design and arch acting.
When we first meet young painters Einar (Eddie Redmayne) and Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander), they are enjoying a happy, tender marriage, marred only by the disparity between their professional levels of success. Einar is an acclaimed creator of stark Nordic landscapes, while Gerda is getting nowhere as a portraitist – not least because the gallery system is reluctant to accommodate women. Then one day their dancer friend Ulla (an alarmingly high-spirited Amber Heard) is late for a portrait sitting. Gerda persuades her husband to deputise in stockings and ballet shoes – and slender-legged Einar visibly experiences a frisson of self-revelation. Later, Einar comments appreciatively on Gerda’s new negligee: “I might let you wear it,” Gerda says, teasingly. “I might enjoy it,” Einar replies. Pause. Gerda (warily): “Is there something you’d like me to know?”
There are several such touches in Lucinda Coxon’s script that flirt awkwardly and self-consciously with farce. There’s the scene where Einar first cross-dresses in public, and attracts an intrigued admirer, played by Ben Whishaw. “You’re different from most girls,” hazards the wistful Whishaw, a moment that Lili’s tart response – “That’s not a very original line” – can’t salvage from absurdity.
The film’s biggest problem – but clearly also its hot selling point – is Redmayne’s performance. It is a very physical rendering: the emphasis is on Einar learning how to be Lili, and Redmayne nicely captures Einar’s study of a certain stylised female body language, with every tilt of his head and turn of his ankle. But he also overdoes it. Affectingly exuberant as he was playing Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, Redmayne here lays it on with a pearl-handled trowel, relentlessly working the toothy grins and coy averted gazes; you almost expect him to whip out a fan to flutter his eyelashes behind.
Meanwhile, Vikander makes it clear that Gerda is a tough modern woman, but ticks the 21st-century “feistiness” box a little too briskly. The Swedish star uses much the same languidly patrician English accent as she did in Testament of Youth, though with a more louchely mannered intonation, as if she permanently has a cigarette holder in her mouth (and often she does).
Despite Lili’s eventual historic operation, performed by surgeon Dr Warnekros (an undemonstrative but impressive Sebastian Koch), we get only the most superficial sense of the protagonist undergoing a process that is any way dangerous, or indeed physical. This overall abstraction is underwritten by the film’s aesthetic gloss. It’s all quite gorgeous – Eve Stewart’s designs, Paco Delgado’s costumes and Danny Cohen’s photography combine to make a luscious, painterly production. Yet Hopper overuses the beauty – too many scenes are distractingly dominated by a perfect frock or a ravishing art nouveau window.
The film aims to capture the struggle of self-realisation, much as Hooper did to such acclaim in The King’s Speech, but there’s little dramatic weight; here his precise, calculated style invokes feeling, rather than stirs it. In tailoring its story to the requirements of prestige costume drama, this decorous, bloodless film removes the operating table from Lili Elbe’s story and puts the coffee table in its place.
