You gotta give it up for films that break barriers, even if they leave you with many more questions than you started with. A biography of 1920s painter Einer Wegener’s transformation into Lili Elbe, The Danish Girl couldn’t have been a major release ten years ago – it’s quite possible it wouldn’t have seen more than a film festival even five years ago. Progress has its own time table.
Einer Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) is the hottest painter in Copenhagen. Everybody loves “Five Dead Trees” or whatever he calls it. Can’t wait for the compelling sequel: “Six Dead Trees.” His wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander) is an artist as well – her talent is lucid, but finds fame elusive. Lacking her dying swan subject one afternoon, she asks Einer to don the outfit of a female ballet dancer. He is relauctant, but submits. The outfit, however, triggers the feminine within and Einer is suddenly enrapt with the idea of womanhood. It isn’t long before he’s sneaking slips under suitclothes and then dressing head-to-toe as Lili. Thanks to an apparent inability to generate body hair and what with keeping his svelte Stephen Hawking bod, Eddie Redmayne makes a convincing woman without much effort.
I can take the lack of hair and natural feminine grace, but how does Lili easily take to walking in heels, let alone find a pair in her size so quickly? Before long, Einer is Lili, even down to having gentlemen callers. The Danish Girl is quite good as pointing out how vulnerable Lili is with respect to Einer. Denmark and France are simply frought with hounds ready to pounce on this plum of womanhood.
So how does Gerda feel about all this? This is really Alicia Vikander’s film – so much so that it is a fair guess that she, not Lili is the titular subject. No, I don’t believe this is really the case, but Alicia’s role as struggling artist/happy wife/scorned wife/supportive friend/successful artist/fearful spouse/lost soul is far more complex than her counterpart. Eddie Redmayne plays Lili as fairly one-note. I 
found his take on woman as insecure and self-indulged an injustice to femininity in general. While Einer painted and considered his spouse’s happiness, Lili is entirely about Lili; it becomes her job just to be her.
I respect The Danish Girl for opening the door – these are complex issues without easy answers. A woman trapped in a man’s body is neither psychosis nor perversion and the direction displays the intricacy of emotion involved, most often through Gerda. What the film didn’t answer are some basic biological questions – we see Einer having sex with his wife and enjoying, not cringing. How does this fit in with his feeling of being a woman? Is Lili a lesbian? Do we imagine somewhere that the Einer switch to Lili not only changed sexual orientation but sexual preference as well? I truly don’t understand, but thank you, Danish Girl, for making me want to understand.
“A transformation needs be made,” he
Thought through grades of shady
Though lyrics are please-y
It’s just too damn easy
To rework “Dude Looks Like a Lady”
Rated R, 119 Minutes
D: Tom Hooper
W: Lucinda Coxon
Genre: LBTGQIA
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: The sexually ostracized
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Conservatives
