This was one of those movies that I went back and forth debating whether I should really watch it. On one hand you have the director who made the King's Speech, on the other hand this will most likely be pandering towards the Oscar crowd quite a bit. As you can probably have guessed I gave in and went to see The Danish Girl, and boy am I happy I did.
Right off the bat I know that I am in for a treat. I know this point is purely suggestive, and I'm probably the only one who loved it, but the fact that the setting was in the 1920s and we got to see these old spectacular houses resting on a fishing town with the brilliant waves gently rocking people's boats just puts me in the best of moods when going into this movie. And that's something that I think not a lot of people would say is a positive, but I felt like I was living in this era of time, and I was enjoying the heck out of all the details they tried to get right.
As for the acting, I thought it was really well done and I was surprised how nonsexual the nude scenes were. When making a financially succesful film studios, or the people making the films, somehow always wants a sex scene with full nudity that just isn't necessary. The only purpose is to get guys excited and earn more profit, but you can clearly tell in this film that they had a huge respect for the human body and treated the nude scenes, and sex scenes, as if it were natural instead of a spectacle like zooming in on certain body parts.
Thinking about that, I am convinced that they had all the best interests at heart when making this very difficult film. The fact that they're trying to make a film about the first recorded Transgender surgery is very daring, since it wouldn't appeal to a lot of people, and could be highly controversial since this film will now represent in people's minds what the transgender community are like.
Now I'm sure the biggest question people have when regarding this film is how well does Eddie Redmayne portray someone who's transgender, and to that I have no idea. I'm not transgender nor do I have any friends who are, but from somebody who doesn't know I thought this film gave me a better understanding at just how much this could be a psychological burden for someone trying to find their true selves.
As for the film in general there were two main things that I wasn't buying. The first is the moment when Einar, played by Eddie Redmayne, first gets these hints that he would like to dress up as a woman. This is supposed to be the pivotal point for this character to realize that there may be more to who he is than he realized, and I just found it to be eye rolling. They probably could make a whole movie of focusing on Einar slowly realizing that he wanted to be Lili, but then it sort of loses something in not showing the first surgery and how these people had to definitely say they wanted to change their body forever. The beginning of Lili awakening, and a few scenes where Lili is realizing that she doesn't want her male body, and the ending of the movie is very dramatic. And when I say dramatic I mean like on the verge of soap opera TV show dramatic, but nevertheless I do think it gets their point across.
The other part of the movie I really didn't get behind is the Einar/Lili character. This is the most important character of the movie, heck the movie is about this character, but throughout the film I was slowly starting to get into the other actors and actresses. It was a little hard to believe that nobody realized Einar was dressing as a woman, and later we know that a few people did know but never said anything, and like Jupiter Ascending I don't understand why Eddie Redmayne had to whisper all the time when he was Lili. I know he's trying to mask his voice, but he couldn't try to make it higher or more feminine if that's where the character was going? Those were just minor problems I had with the character, but the biggest problem I have, and I'm not sure if that's on the actor's fault, the director's, or the screen writer's, but during the transformation scenes it clearly felt like they were treating Einar as if he had multiple personality disorder, and while I can see outsiders think that it bothered me that a character who supposedly felt in his soul he was meant to be a woman was saying "The Einar half needs to die," "Lili doesn't want Einar to come out again," and basically separating the two as different entities even though they should be the same, just in different bodies.
However, taking what the film did, I did like Eddie Redmayne's ability to tranform. You can clearly see that his Einar at the beginning was totally different than his Lili persona at the end, and when they were transforming and meshing the personas you could clearly tell them apart.
Overall this was a very well made film, and I do have some story problems like the fact that when people did learn of Einar wanting to be a woman they were all supportive in 1920 even though it was still part of the "behind closed doors" part of time. I really enjoyed the acting, I loved the set pieces, and I am genuinely glad I went to see it.
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