The Danish Girl ★★★
A film of two parts; a moving and emotional first half stifled by a meandering and predictable second.
Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander star as Einar and Gerda Wegener, an artist couple in 1920s Copenhagen that struggle to make their marriage work once Einar (re)discovers Lily, a female identity that becomes increasingly more dominant.
Eddie Redmayne is shaping into one of the biggest names in Hollywood right now and for good reason — he’s picking good roles (let’s forget about his shocking performance in Jupiter Ascending, shall we?). It’s a shame that some of the magic of previous performances gets lost as a star rises however; the little ticks and shy behaviour of his Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything seem less impressive once repeated for Einar Wegener.
But still, he does a fantastic job in this film and manages to (fairly convincingly) portray two different people throughout, so the audience always knows who is present in the scene (Einar or Lily). And the relationship between him and his wife Gerda, who at first supports and even encourages what she thinks is a cross between a joke and a fetish, is genuinely moving. There’s real love there and throughout the first half of the film, up until the film shifts to Paris, you really want their relationship to work through the obvious difficulty.
The problem is that once the narrative travels to Paris the story actually follows Gerda for the most part. Whilst this in itself isn’t a problem — Alicia carries her scenes just as well as Eddie — it means that by the time Lily has become the dominant or even only identity, it isn’t she who garners sympathy. It’s Gerda, the supportive wife, the eyes through which the audience has been viewing the story unfold, the person left reeling from what ends up (unfairly) seeming a selfish decision on Einar/Lily’s part. I’m pretty sure that’s not what the director intended.
The pacing also drops dramatically at around the halfway point; during the first half I was thoroughly engrossed in how their marriage would play out, how far Gerda would be willing to go, and whether or not Einar would return or if Lily would take over completely (I must admit, I didn’t realise until the credits that the film is based on a true story). During the second I didn’t care so much, and that’s because a.) I felt annoyed for Gerda, despite the completely fair motives on Lily’s part, and b.) because everything became completely predictable. It’s not a case of excitedly waiting to see how things unfold, rather one of waiting for the story to trudge its way to its final moments.
That’s not for a moment to say that the film isn’t good, it’s just the slow, ‘my bum hurts in the cinema seat’ second half that lets it down. It doesn’t have the momentum to hold itself up, unfortunately. It’s still worth seeing, if only for the acting and relationship between the two central characters (alongside Ben Whishaw’s Henrik and Matthias Schoenaert’s Hans, who bears an unsettling resemblance to Vladimir Putin here). Perhaps viewing it more as a biopic and less of a drama would have bettered my experience; perhaps this is just another example of a great film only managing to be good.
