My memory of the exact timelines here is a bit fuzzy, probably because I was not personally affected by this discourse. But I don't think ten years ago, we had yet determined that there was something less than ideal about a trans character being played by a cisgender actor. In fact, ten years ago, most of us might not even have known what "cisgender" meant.
Ten years ago, in 2015, was when The Danish Girl came out. This was my final of four weekly viewings for Pride Month, the movie I had previously mentioned as a blind spot for me, especially considering my exhaustive coverage of films of a certain prominence from this period. I mean, The Danish Girl won an Oscar, for Alicia Vikander. I think a timing issue prevented me from seeing it in the year it came out -- yes, IMDB tells me it was released on January 21, 2016 in Australia, which would have been a week after that year's ranking deadline. And I didn't prioritize seeing it once it was no longer urgent to rank it.
I'm going to get to telling you my thoughts on the film and some contemplations of what has changed in those ten years, but first I have to give you the baggage I brought into The Danish Girl, some of which I would have had at the time, some of which I've acquired since. As you may have detected, this is leading up to a somewhat sour finish to Pride Month, but hey -- you can't love every movie, even with subject matter as important as this.
Here's that baggage:
1) I have always had an issue with Eddie Redmayne. I don't know what it is, I just feel a bit unnerved by him. Those qualities may actually serve him to some degree in a movie about a person who feels uncomfortable in their own skin, but on practical terms, it keeps me at a distance. The only times I've really liked him on screen were in the Fantastic Beasts movies. That's not to say I don't think he's talented, just that his particular talents don't really work on me because of the way he unnerves me.
2) Tom Hooper, the director, has subsequently proven himself to be a bit of a hack. I think we all were on board with The King's Speech, the best picture winner, but I really disliked his Les Miserables (which also won an Oscar for supporting actress), and then his version of Cats was a cultural laughingstock. There's an excessive earnestness mixed with melodrama in these last two. After seeing The Danish Girl, I'm convinced this just characterizes him on the whole.
Both of these two contribute to why The Danish Girl did not work for me, but let's start with Redmayne.
Ten years ago, it was still okay for Redmayne to play this role. The way the conversation about representation has shifted has been both a positive development, and a potentially limiting one. Although it is now generally acknowledged that a trans performer should play a trans character, the reality is, there are not many trans performers who are also certified box office draws. Elliot Page can't play every trans role out there, especially since that would only cover trans men. While this does make for potentially greater representation among actors -- the most prominent three trans movies last year, Emilia Perez, The People's Joker and Will & Harper, all had trans actors playing trans characters, or playing themselves -- the flip side of that is that Hollywood may have just shied away from telling new trans stories, because they want the bankable stars but don't want to ruffle feathers.
The fact that Redmayne should no longer play this role is not fatal to the fortunes of The Danish Girl, because there's no question that he approaches the material sensitively (perhaps too sensitively, more on that in a minute). But it is hard to watch it in 2025 and not think about this.
When I think about this issue of who can play whom, I think about the backlash against Scarlett Johansson when she agreed to play a trans character and then ultimately backed out of that role after the internet blew up. That was in 2018. So in 2015, we were still three years away from this being talked about popularly, if I am indeed right that this was a watershed moment in this discussion. It's interesting to think about how recent this whole discussion is, and how much we've grown up, collectively, in such a short amount of time.
So yeah, it was okay for Redmayne to play Lili Elbe, born Einer Wegener, in 2015. Do I think his performance is good? Not really.
Once I started noticing Redmayne's go-to trick in the role, I couldn't top noticing it, since he kept on doing it. His big emotional transition over 15 to 30 seconds, which he does maybe a half-dozen times, is to start out looking scared or unsure, then get a faraway look in his eyes, then resolve his features into a bashful grin. The first time, it's interesting. Soon after, it's a crutch.
The fact that both he and Vikander spend most of this movie in a sort of foggy haze of tears, forever on the verge of crying or having just cried, is, in many ways, appropriate to the subject matter. This is emotional subject matter and it is serious subject matter. But as directed by Hooper, it feels constantly turned up to 11. I think Hooper's only mode is to shout at us.
I should probably tell you a little more what that subject matter is, if you don't know.
The real Einer Wegener was a citizen of Copenhagen in the year 1926, and married to his wife Gerda. (Every time they said her name, I thought they were saying Goethe, like the German writer.) They're both painters. He's a landscape artist, and she does portraits. (Until he becomes Lili, I'll use the pronoun "he" for the sake of clarity.)
One day she asks him to stand in for a female model who couldn't be present, requiring him to wear a dress and fit into some dainty women's shoes. She couldn't have known he has a secret proclivity for this sort of thing, but that's the first place I thought this movie mis-stepped. Because we aren't given any clue about Einer's predilections -- is that a weighted word? -- at first we are left with the idea that he "became" trans as a result of seeing himself in women's clothing, rather than that this was, for him, a very weighted moment of flirtation with what he'd always wanted. We don't see that putting on these clothes is anything other than a lark for Einer, and then all the sudden -- at least that's how the movie makes it feel -- he has questions about his gender and his true self.
Ten years ago, we may not even yet have been fully clear on the idea, as a society, that being trans is not a choice, not something that comes on suddenly, but a thing each person knows has been in them their entire lives. Surely, there's an innate effeminate quality to Redmayne that makes it easier to believe the character has always felt this way, and after the fact, he/she talks about it in those terms. But as first introduced, it seems like the character might have "caught" a "trans virus," and prior to modeling the women's clothing was just an ordinary husband with ordinary heterosexual hungers and images of self.
I also wondered at the responses of the medical community who meet with Einer, who rapidly is no longer appropriately referred to that way. In fact, let's switch over now to calling her Lili.
Although Lili does finally come across a sympathetic doctor, the ones she encounters before that are extreme caricatures. In fact, there's one that gets super annoyed at Gerda and says "Surely you must know that your husband is insane." Of course, a hundred years ago, "insane" was a very medically defensible term -- even 20 years ago it probably was. However, it does seem hard to imagine that a man of science has so little interest in possible schisms between the biological reality of one's body and the emotional reality of one's mind. Methinks The Danish Girl goes too far in the opposite direction of presenting these doctors as a bunch of quacks and idiots, almost to the point that it becomes slapstick -- which surely is not in keeping with the rest of the tone of the film. Oh and by the way, the doctor in question promptly terminates the interview with Gerda by walking away from her in disgust, another improbable response from a medical professional, even a medical professional from a century ago.
I will admit that as a person who has set aside a month to watch four trans films, I very much wanted each of the films I saw to be good. Only the first was very good, but that happens.
So it does pain me to deliver a negative verdict on The Danish Girl. But you are doing a far worse disservice to trans representation if you just rubber stamp everything as good because you want to lift up these themes and this representation. Certainly, the trans advocates who shat on Emilia Perez understand that. It's not just "any well-intentioned representation of trans people is good representation of trans people."
And the fact is, these praised performances -- Vikander's as well -- just aren't really award worthy, if you ask me. They and their director are giving us something so saturated in emotion that it becomes downright soggy with it. It's not an easy touch to underplay rather than overplay something, but the things that are underplayed almost always affect us the most, because their emotional potency sneaks up on us. The Danish Girl equates a constant dropping of shallow buzzwords about self-actualization, combined with a lot of tears and emotional intensity, with elevating a topic to its grandest form. But it shouldn't be easy to get this touch right, which is why some people are great filmmakers and some people are just mid.
If we are celebrating Pride Month on film, we should also be proud of the efforts of the filmmakers, and The Danish Girl just doesn't really get close enough. Lili Elbe's story was one that deserved to be told, it just should have been told better.
That brings me to the end of another Pride Month celebration here on The Audient. I'm already thinking of the possible themes for 2026.
No comments:
Post a Comment