He’s a beauty, but this won’t win Eddie another Oscar
Eddie Redmayne lifted an academy award in the year just gone, but until we actually saw him on screen he struck hardly anyone as a perfect fit to play the brilliant, blighted Stephen Hawking (in The Theory Of everything). Before anybody saw The Danish Girl, by contrast, Redmayne seemed an entirely logical choice to play one of the world’s first ‘gender reassignment’ patients. after all, he is a pretty rather than handsome man, and would surely make a convincing woman.
The film, too, in the capable hands of Tom (The King’s Speech) Hooper, sounded like a nailed-on awards contender.
Set initially in Copenhagen in 1926, it has everything that awards-voters and juries love: lashings of period charm, and a subject certain to appeal to modern, liberal sensibilities. especially considering its topicality, in the wake of Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner and boxing promoter Frank maloney so publicly transforming themselves, respectively, into Caitlyn and Kellie. But The danish Girl is a disappointment. i saw it first in September at the Venice Film Festival, and although it was greeted there with applause, it was the respectful response of a crowd who felt they ought to applaud, rather than an uninhibited hoorah. Which is about right.
Hooper’s film is an exquisite-looking, irreproachably worthy but emotionally undercharged effort to tell the story of einar Wegener, an accomplished landscape artist who, with the support of his feisty portrait-painter wife, Gerda, believed science might put right what nature had got wrong.
He felt he was a woman trapped in a man’s body and eventually found an understanding surgeon prepared to spring him from his torment.
yet the film begins with einar (Redmayne) and Gerda (the excellent alicia Vikander) blissfully married, their mutual passion so much the envy of their friends that at social gatherings everyone stands around cheerfully listening to them talk about how they fell in love.
They are the sort of couple who in real life would be utterly insufferable, but in a parallel movie reality are instead the toast of Copenhagen.
LUCINDA COXON’S screenplay, based on a book by david ebershoff, seems at pains to assert einar’s heterosexuality, but then comes the film’s pivotal moment, when Gerda asks him to pose in stockings and pink slippers to help her finish the painting of a ballerina. Suddenly, he realises he feels more at home in women’s clothing; gradually, he also feels sexually more comfortable. and at first Gerda, too, is tantalised by the transformation. They attend a ball together, with him adopting the new identity of Lili. Both refer to Lili in the third person.
Redmayne’s somewhat androgynous looks are indeed perfectly suited to this metamorphosis. He does make a striking woman. But, while it verges on the blasphemous to criticise a popular and wholesome British star, whose Oscar was deservedly won, he can be a disconcertingly mannered actor.
The danish Girl brings out the worst of this tendency; as einar battles with his gender confusion, all the coy, fluttery glances and disarmingly sudden grins, in which Redmayne rather specialises, become wearing.
This is a shame, because Lili elbe (as she became) was a genuine pioneer, and deserves to have her story told. But i went hoping to be entranced as well as enlightened by The danish Girl, and i simply wasn’t.
Like both its leads, the film is a pleasure to look at. Twenties Copenhagen, and later Paris, are evoked with a painterly eye by the director and his regular collaborator, cinematographer danny Cohen. But in a way that’s part of the problem.
This is a tale of powerfully, painfully visceral feelings, which are somehow at odds with the calculated gorgeousness of everybody and everything. even a shot of nurses mopping a wooden floor is picture-postcard material.
There are memorable scenes, such as when einar visits a Paris peep show, seemingly in an attempt to re-ignite his heterosexual urges, yet finds himself instead mimicking the feminine poses of the (improbably beautiful) prostitute.
But on the whole The danish Girl, though thematically similar to The King’s Speech in its period setting and its tale of a man trying to overcome a challenge both physical and psychological, does not deserve to sweep up awards like Hooper’s 2010 triumph. it is not nearly as good.
JOY, another true story brought to the screen, is another mild disappointment. director and co-writer david O. Russell has adopted what amounts almost to a repertory group of actors, and what a repertory it is: Robert de niro, Bradley Cooper and above all Jennifer Lawrence, all of whom shone in Russell’s films Silver Linings Playbook (2012) and american Hustle (2013).
Here, Lawrence plays Joy mangano, a single mother from a dysfunctional italian/american blue-collar family whose thunderous entrepreneurial success 20 years or so ago sprang, rather neatly, from the domestic drudgery of her early adulthood. She invented the self-wringing so-called miracle mop, and cleaned up by promoting it herself on the shopping channel QVC.
This version of the american dream unfolds a bit like a modern Cinderella, but with one crucial difference: it is not the story of a young woman who casts away her mop to become a princess, but one whose mop actually made her a princess, or at least as close as the u.S. gets: a woman with a platinum american express card.
FUNDAMENTALLY, though, there’s nothing inherently interesting, let alone sexy, about a mop. Russell is plainly aware of that, and of the potential limitations of a narrative which hinges on a metal and plastic injection mouldings factory (where Joy has her moneyspinning mops manufactured).
But he over-compensates, gussying up his film with all kinds of comic whimsy.
The black-and-white TV soap operas, to which Joy’s agoraphobic mother (Virginia madsen) is addicted, are given centre stage. The family’s dysfunctionality looks like plain weirdness.
it all quickly becomes too quirky for its own good.
at the centre of the quirkiness, Lawrence gives her usual impeccable performance, with sturdy support from Cooper as the QVC boss neil Walker, de niro as her flaky father Rudy, diane Ladd as her beloved grandmother mimi, and isabella Rossellini playing Rudy’s wealthy girlfriend, to whom Joy turns for financial backing.
Keep an eye out, too, for QVC star presenter Joan Rivers, who is played by Rivers’s own daughter, melissa.
However, in an era in which entrepreneurial striving looms large on our TVs all the time — through the likes of The apprentice — maybe Russell should have made a different kind of creative investment.
These days, we don’t need a director’s whims and flourishes to capture our interest in a business story; we just need the story.