Tom Hooper (2015)

Lili Elbe (1882-1931) was a Danish transgender woman and one of the first known recipients of sex reassignment surgery. Lili was the new – for her, the true – identity of a man called Einar Wegener. As an art student in Copenhagen, Wegener met and married a fellow student, Gerda Gottlieb. He completed his studies and soon became a successful landscape artist. According to Wikipedia, the Wegeners, after eight years of marriage, settled in 1912 in Paris, ‘where Elbe could live openly as a woman and Gottlieb [as] a lesbian’. Gerda, whose early work consisted mostly of illustrations for books and fashion magazines, became famous as a portraitist of femme fatale figures, for which a transvestite Einar was the artist’s model. After transitioning, Lili herself ceased to paint, believing that her art work was part of an identity she had now abandoned. She lived socially as a woman for some fifteen years before undergoing the first of four gender reassignment operations in Germany in 1930. She died the following year, of complications following surgery to implant a uterus and construct a vagina. In 2000 David Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl, a fictionalised account of Einar Wegener-Lili Elbe’s life, was published. Ebershoff’s novel is the source of the screenplay, written by Lucinda Coxon, for Tom Hooper’s film.

There haven’t been too many mainstream movie protagonists like Einar-Lili but the casting of the starring role in The Danish Girl follows a time-honoured, commercially shrewd tradition. Online photographs of Einar Wegener show a man whose looks are strikingly odd but far from pretty. With Eddie Redmayne playing him, the film’s Wegener is easy on the eye: as Lili, Redmayne is an androgynous image of extraordinary beauty. The casting comes at a dramatic cost, though. Redmayne’s fine bone structure and features mean that he’s less well-equipped to convey Lili’s increasing claustrophobia – her experiencing the lineaments of masculinity as a hateful encumbrance. You never feel that Redmayne’s Lili is trapped in the wrong body. Although his work in the film has been predictably praised and Oscar-nominated, Redmayne has received some bad notices too: Ryan Gilbey, for example, dismisses it as ‘all mannerism and no inner life’. Einar Wegener’s journey to Lili-hood begins when Gerda, whose female model can’t get to a painting session in time, asks her husband to help out by putting on the shoes and stockings which the model would have worn. From this point onwards, Einar spends a good deal of screen time trying out being a woman – literally striking feminine poses. To that extent, Gilbey’s ‘all mannerism’ criticism is harsh but it’s also understandable. Eddie Redmayne is evidently both a gifted actor and game for anything but he’s up against weak direction and a weaker script. It’s laudable, in principle, that Tom Hooper and Lucinda Coxon eschew the easy option of journal entries read as voiceover to convey Einar-Lili’s feelings – and, of course, her struggle to understand what she’s feeling is an important part of the story. I nevertheless wanted to know more about the character’s inner thoughts than Redmayne’s face is able to convey. His performance becomes repetitive, as does Alicia Vikander’s as Gerda. It’s virtually inevitable because both are playing the same scene repeatedly and the repetition doesn’t feel intentional. You get a sense not that Einar-Lili and Gerda kept having the same conversation ad nauseam – only that Hooper and Lucinda Coxon can’t find ways to dramatise their situation with any kind of variety.

The bohemian world to which the Wegeners belong is a promising element. You accept that a couple with their lifestyle might be unusually ready to experiment, sexually and sartorially. Alicia Vikander’s Gerda is rather a fatuous flirt in the early scenes, when the wife has no doubts about her husband’s masculinity or that she arouses him.  But Vikander is very effective in expressing Gerda’s shocked realisation that Einar’s pretending to be a woman isn’t to him the amusing game that Gerda thought it was. When she learns what the cross-dressing really means to him, Gerda reacts with a relatively conventional horror that’s momentarily affecting. Hooper and Coxon allow her confusion of anger and distress quickly to dissipate, however:  you lose touch with what she’s feeling too. Alicia Vikander could use a heart-to-heart or two with someone more free-thinking than Gerda turns out to be, once the complexity and implications of her husband’s sexuality emerge. She has a very brief conversation with the couple’s dancer friend, Ulla (Amber Heard), but it’s not enough. There’s an interesting passing suggestion that Gerda finds consolation in the fact that the transvestite Einar – qua artist’s model – boosts her own painting career. But she soon becomes little more than a generic saddened-but-loyally-supportive wife.

There are two other significant male characters – significant, that is, in that they serve a plot function and are played by Ben Whishaw and Matthias Schoenaerts. Whishaw is a young man called Henrik. I found the first two scenes involving him baffling and the last one insulting. Henrik is intrigued by Lili when she makes her public debut at the annual artists’ ball in Copenhagen. (Einar doesn’t want to attend as himself but agrees to accompany Gerda, in the guise of Einar’s female cousin.) The emotional tautness of Whishaw’s playing is compelling but when Henrik makes advances to Lili, what does he think he’s after? Does he realise Lili is a man in drag when no one else at the ball shows the slightest suspicion of this? If so, is it the drag that attracts Henrik? We next meet him when Einar goes, as Lili, to his house. It’s made clear this isn’t the first such visit but, when Henrik tries to grope his visitor, Einar-Lili pulls away. Henrik asks why Einar doesn’t tell his wife what’s going on between them, a suggestion that I endorsed if only to find out what was going on. (In the event, the subsequent conversation between Einar and Gerda left me none the wiser.) Years later, Lili and Gerda return from Paris to Copenhagen for a while, and Lili happens to see Henrik. They talk and Lili explains her new identity. Afterwards, she tells Gerda about the meeting and that Henrik ‘is homosexual’. We guessed that – Henrik now wears a beret at a jaunty angle. The cheap visual aid still doesn’t clarify the nature of his earlier attraction to Lili.

Matthias Schoenaerts is Hans Axgil, a childhood friend of Einar and now an art dealer in Paris: Gerda seeks him out when the Wegeners arrive in the city. The sexual ambiguities in the couple’s relationships with Hans are more entertainingly complicated than those in the Lili-Henrik interactions. Gerda knows from her husband that, when they were children, Hans was kissed by Einar. Hans is now physically attracted to Gerda but she resists. (I assumed this resistance reflected a mixed-up loyalty to Einar-Lili rather than that Gerda didn’t want sex with Hans but I may be wrong. Incidentally, if there’s any hint in the film of the real Gerda’s supposed lesbianism I missed, or have already forgotten, it.) There’s also a momentary suggestion – in the way he caresses her bare neck – of Hans being sexually drawn to Lili. One way and another, a good many attempts to make sexual contact are aborted in the course of the movie: because this caress is an exception it’s also arresting. Whatever the real meanings of the Lili-Gerda-Hans triangle, the upshot of their encounters is that Hans is reduced to the role of faithful friend to both the others, and Schoenaerts is largely wasted. At least he gets to deliver the wittiest line, though. As he bids farewell to Lili as she boards a train, bound for Germany and sex reassignment surgery, Hans tells her there are few people in his life whom he’s really liked but that ‘you’re two of them’. The joke is welcome: The Danish Girl, although it contains more than enough shyly mischievous grins from Eddie Redmayne, is short on humour.

The Wikipedia article on the film explains that Lucinda Coxon worked for a decade on the screenplay before the project came to fruition. That decade wasn’t long enough: Coxon’s script is full of holes, mostly convenient ones. The Wegeners are remarkably isolated. They appear to have no parents or siblings or other family and their very few acquaintances disappear once they might encumber the progress of the main story. It’s suggested in the opening scene that Einar is the leading Danish artist of his generation yet there’s no indication in what follows of the impact on the Copenhagen art world of his ceasing to paint. (We don’t get much sense even of what it means to him.) Once the couple reach Paris, the development of Einar’s new identity is put on ice until it’s needed: he doesn’t appear to cross-dress until the evening that Gerda brings Hans back to the Wegeners’ home for the first time, and Lili takes them both by surprise. A particularly stupid and annoying episode in Paris sees Lili being verbally then physically abused by a couple of roughs in a public park. She is wearing a jacket over a loose-fitting blouse and trousers which are nearly culottes. Why does she dress in such an eye-catchingly androgynous way for this outing?  So that the roughs are able to identify her as a man trying to look like a woman, and to behave brutally. If Lili had worn conventional clothes, either men’s or women’s (and we know very well by now that the latter are what she likes to wear), she wouldn’t have attracted attention in the way that she does.

To be fair to Coxon, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether the fault lies with her or with Tom Hooper. The timeframe of the story isn’t always clear (although it’s clearly abbreviated from the real Einar Wegener-Lili Elbe’s biography). More important, Hooper starts hares then forgets about them. In the early scenes, he emphasises the touch and movement of women’s clothing in a way that draws you in. He soon drops this textural element – which might have served as a persisting expression of what Einar yearns to be. Hooper is happier with more obvious signals of Einar’s secret – like the furtive, excited glint in Eddie Redmayne’s eyes when, in an early scene, Gerda leaves the apartment: now he has the place to himself! (To do what in, though – since the later moment, when Einar dons silk stockings and pretty shoes at Gerda’s request, is presented as epiphanic?) Eve Stewart’s production design and Danny Cohen’s framing and lighting combine to evoke art-history images of the time and place of the story. I realise that I tend to take this for granted in movies about real-life artists and don’t sufficiently appreciate the film-making craft and skill involved. Even so, The Danish Girl is – like Girl with a Pearl Earring and, to an extent, Mr Turner – too pictorial. Einar-Lili is a disappointingly attenuated personality:  she’s mostly interested in clothes and make-up. The costumes by Paco Delgado are ravishing but you expect more from the life of a transgender pioneer.

5 January 2016