Weekend Watch: “The Danish Girl”

“The Danish Girl” isn’t awful. I kind of thought it would be, for a lot of reasons. Despite a 70% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, most critics who I regularly follow gave it negative reviews, and some publications claimed it wasn’t a good representation of the transgender community. Overall, it seemed to be a very Oscar bait-y type movie to me, and the fact that Eddie Redmayne was the star was only more off-putting. I don’t really mind Redmayne (haven’t seen “Les Mis” yet), but I despised “The Theory of Everything,” the last movie that he was really recognized for. Even though “The Danish Girl” has a different director than “The Theory of Everything,” the presence of Eddie Redmayne somehow seemed to confirm to me that it’d be as bad.

And it isn’t. There are moments of “The Danish Girl” that are emotionally affecting, and it’s bolstered by solid performances from Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander, and Matthias Schoenaerts. (This type of movie seems to always have committed actors that often outshine the script and direction. See: Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley in “The Imitation Game,” Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush in “The King’s Speech,” etc.)

The first 45 minutes or so, in fact, I really liked. I think the way Einar gradually realized that she was actually Lili was fairly well-done, and there’s some genuine fun in the scenes where Lili dresses up and hangs out with Gerda. Those are the kinds of scenes that are happy for multiple reasons—on the one hand, they’re like fun dress-up games with a cute couple, and on the other hand, they show a very important, serious transformation taking place. As much melodrama and repetition as there is late in the movie, these early scenes of Lili discovering her identity are nice because she seems genuinely happy to finally be dressing as the person she feels like inside.

The power of these early scenes is that you know that even though everything’s fun and happy and positive, it’s not going to stay that way. Gerda, inevitably, is not going to be okay with Lili’s transformation once she realizes it’s for real and not just a game. And there’s a power to seeing these pleasant scenes slowly melt into serious drama. Lili’s trip to the ball is initially fun and slightly humorous as she awkwardly pretends she’s a cisgender woman, but then there’s the very serious and emotional scene when Henrik (Ben Whishaw) goes off with Lili and kisses her. This is probably Redmayne’s best scene as Lili slowly gives in to Henrik’s advances and kisses him back, terrified and nervous. I could really feel the pain and confusion and desire. (More on gender versus sexuality down below.)

Despite this really solid early section, I couldn’t help but pick up some negative similarities between the movie and “The Theory of Everything.” While Lili’s childhood friend Hans is a potentially interesting character as played by the charismatic Schoenaerts, he ultimately seems to serve as a pointless ‘new partner’ role for Gerda, like Charlie Cox’s character in “Theory.” At least the romance isn’t really developed, and at least the movie ends with him quietly supporting Gerda after she loses Lili, but his character felt like a big missed opportunity to show what Lili was like when she was young.

Redmayne’s performance is more impressive to me here than the physical contortions of his role as Stephen Hawking, but I still get the sense that he’s really trying to show off to the Academy. Some of his scenes crying are really well-done, but there’s too many, and there’s something about his scenes dressed up as a female that seem especially showy. It’s like Look! I can dress up and look like a woman! Look how surprisingly attractive I am in traditional ladies’ clothes! This was one aspect that I hadn’t even picked up on until I read Carol Grant’s article about the movie simplifying womanhood, but “The Danish Girl” does tend to reduce being a woman to lipstick, traditionally feminine fashion, having gal pals, and sleeping with men.

Speaking of which: there isn’t much sex in this movie at all, and it’s kind of difficult to tell whether there should be more or even less. In real life, Lili was a heterosexual trans woman (or bisexual—it’s kind of hard to tell from the cursory research I’ve done), but it’s difficult to tell what role sexuality plays in the film. When Lili kisses Henrik, what does this exactly mean—that she’s solely attracted to men, or that she’s attracted to them in addition to women? During the sex scenes between Lili and Gerda, is Lili secretly thinking of men, or is she genuinely attracted to Gerda? When their marriage dissolves, is the implication that Lili has no genuine attraction to Gerda, romantic or sexual, or is it just that this dramatic transition drives them apart?

In many ways, this would be an easier story to tell if it focused exclusively on gender instead of adding in enough hints of sexuality to wish for more. If Lili began dressing exclusively as a woman, that’d provide ample reason for Gerda to be concerned; it didn’t need to be a kiss with a man that made her question it. Based on the kiss and the fact that Lili has secretly been seeing Henrik, Lili’s sexuality seems to be the main thing driving her and her wife apart, not her gender identity—the ostensible focus of the movie.

This lack of clarity about the characters, their sexualities, and their motivations makes the film begin feeling generally disjointed and shapeless after about 45 minutes. Gerda oscillates between a friendly support of Lili and a sudden rage at her husband seemingly every scene. In some movies, the occasional return of an old anger and sadness may be realistic (see the long fight scene in “Before Midnight”), but in this one, it gets exhausting to try to figure out what the nature of the characters’ relationship really is.

It doesn’t help that there aren’t many dimensions to the characters, especially Lili. What is Lili’s personality, really? ‘Painter’ and ‘transgender’ are descriptors, but not personality traits. Gerda actually acknowledges this in a rare self-aware moment when Lili says, “I want to be a woman, not a painter,” and Gerda says, “Well, some people have been known to do both.” Lili’s line epitomizes the flatness of her character post-gender revelation, but Gerda’s funny self-aware line doesn’t do enough to remedy that. Part of the strength of the beginning of the film is in seeing them talking and showing their personalities outside of the main conflict, but once the real plot kicks into gear, they play pretty flat characters, getting into the arguments and big dramatic discussions that you’d expect them to. Like when Gerda asks Lili to bring her husband back and she says, “I can’t.”

Speaking of which, there’s something vaguely uncomfortable about the repeated insistence that Einar and Lili are separate people. Lili speaks of her past male self like she is killing him by ‘becoming’ Lili. In the society when the movie is set, it’s not unreasonable to think of gender identity as something that changes a person into another person, so it’s not inherently offensive, but it becomes questionable when Lili repeatedly emphasizes that she’s becoming a new person, as if not a single aspect of her previous life was worth living.

And, going back to Gerda’s earlier self-aware line, here’s another instance of inconsistent characterization: sometimes, Lili (and, through her, the movie itself) does seem to be completely self-aware, but other times, it doesn’t. Once, Lili says, “I think Lili’s thoughts, I dream her dreams. She was always there.” But later on, she and Gerda speak as if Lili really never was there, that Lili genuinely was Einar, a male, for most of her life. As funny as Hans’s line “I’ve only liked a handful of people in my life, and you’ve been two of them” is, it’s too much of a literalization of the transition Lili has undergone. No, Hans—Lili has only been one of them. This is the same person you hung out with and loved as a kid.

And then there’s the ending, the maudlin death scene. I’m not sure what makes a death feel manipulative and empty; it’s hard to determine. I mean, in real life, Lili Elbe did die during an operation to construct a uterus and vagina for her. Still, though, there’s something off-putting about feeling the need to make one last attempt at eliciting emotion.

Because with movies like this, the best moments are the subtle ones, the ones that can’t be explained in a few words. There can be big, broad moments with obvious emotional connotations like Joan Clarke telling Alan Turing “Sometimes it’s the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine” in “The Imitation Game,” and those can be affecting in their simplicity, but there’s nothing really interesting or new or thought-provoking about moments like that. Similarly, while I felt myself getting goose bumps several times in the movie, I was conscious that that was a result of Alexandre Desplat’s soaring score, the performances, and the feeling that I should be getting emotional at that point. I was not genuinely sad when Lili died at the end of the movie. I felt like it was an inevitability in a movie like this.

And I think that’s what reminded me the most of “The Theory of Everything,” a movie I found much worse than this one: the unfortunate feeling that all of this was so predictable. Yeah, maybe Lili Elbe did die during the operation in real life. But of course the movie had to end that way. Of course it did.