The Danish Girl (2015)

[CJohn]

Discuss

[filmlover]

Oddly flat and uninvolving. Who knew a movie about a man willingly having himself castrated could be so lifeless? Tom Hooper does just that, as he directs the film without much verve. None of the blame should be placed upon the actors though: Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander certainly give it their best shot and deliver fine performances, but are ultimately weighed down by a script that's all surface level and no depth. Even the ending, while sad, left me feeling cold. This is certainly a timely film in light of the recent Caitlyn Jenner domination and had potential to be something really special, but the end result just doesn't connect. C

[Avatree]

Strange to see a good actor so out of depth in such a shallow role.

[Jake Gittes]

I finished this about 20 minutes ago and I can already barely remember what happened in it. 

[Kvikk Lunsj]

Overall I liked it a lot. Great performances 

4/5

[DAJK]

Saw this almost a month ago, and while I was slightly disappointed, I would be lying if I went off and said the movie wasn't good overall.

 

7/10

[Blankments]

Nothing about The Danish Girl works. The direction is bland. Redmayne's performance is hammy and completely unbelievable. The script is generic at points and cringeworthy for the rest. The score is more fitting for a horror movie than anything meant to be empowering. By the time the postscript shows up before the credits, you will be upset for Lili Elbe that such a horrendous film is her legacy. It's an actively insulting piece of cinema, and not that enjoyable to watch. The only person that escapes the trainwreck unscathed is Alicia Vikander, who gives a good performance considering the material, but that can't save this disaster. The Danish Girl is awful and an insult to all things celluloid. F

[Fancyarcher]

Here's a review I wrote of the film for the blog I write for.

The Danish Girl is another one of those unfortunate films that really messes up the potential of its subject material. That’s not to say it’s a bad movie, but there’s a really great film to be made based off transgendered and this film isn’t it. The Danish Girl follows the typical tropes of your stereotypical Oscar-baiting film, and it very much trends familiar ground. Much of the film feels like it would fit right at home with something on BBC. The film’s biggest flaw is that’s a very slow moving boring picture, and it didn’t really interest me that much.

The Danish Girl is based off the true story of Einar Wegener (played by Eddie Redmayne), a man who is married to a Danish painter named Gerda (played by Alicia Vikander in an academy-award winning performance), whose personality starts to change after his wife paints him as a woman in a picture. The painting slowly gains popularity and Einar begins dressing up as a woman named Lili Eibe, which begins to affect his personality, to the point where he believes that he is the women in the picture. Gerda begins to realize depressingly that her husband is changing from the man she once married.

There are some positive to Danish Girl. As usual the production design is good and the film looks like a period piece, and the sets and designs are unsurprisingly well-done. The score by Alexandre Desplat might in fact be the best thing about the film, even if it’s used a little inappropriately in a sequence where Einar and Gerda are having sex. It’s very beautiful and yet mysterious and even dreary and dark-sounding in one scene.                                           

Now as for the rest of the film, well… the Danish Girl’s performances are mostly fine, but I don’t consider any of them to be great. Not that the actors themselves are bad, but they’re saddled with a lot of material that isn’t really particularly great or even kinda good. Lucinda Coxon’s script is very melodramatic and contains some overbearing and unnatural and quite cliché dialogue. There’s literally a moment in the film where Lili’s admirer Henrik (played by Ben Whislaw) tells her (him) the story of the “Have you heard the story of the great oak tree? It is said that if you catch its fallen acorn, you will be granted a wish”, and all I could think to myself is that I want some of that power. Other lines of dialogue such as “Stop drinking more eggs”, and “I feel as though I’m performing” certainly don’t help in the films favor either.

Redmayne’s performance as a transgender is a bit of a mixed bag for me. On the one hand I can understand what he’s trying to do by acting all quiet as transgender person, and he does a fine job in the role. At the time same time he might as well be playing his character from Jupiter Ascending judging by the amount of times he whispers and acts insane in the film. He also spends a lot of his performance trying on dresses and looking at himself in the mirror, that it almost insane. Alicia Vikander, who should won have won for Ex-Machina and not this film, gives a good performance, but it’s more serviceable than anything. It doesn’t help that she’s saddled with the stereotypical suffering wife character that we see in films too often. The rest of the cast doesn’t make much of an impression, but is pretty good.

Tom Hooper’s (The King’s Speech, Les Mis) direction is unmemorable and a little bit uninspiring. He’s not exactly a bad director, but it’s pretty clear at this point judging by the projects he’s picking, that he’s trying to shoot for Oscar glory a bit too much. There are no notable shots in the film.

Ultimately I think the greatest sin The Danish Girl has going for it, is in wasted potential. The film spends so much time building up Einar’s obsession and then transformation, that we never really see the consequences of how people view him, aside from his wife. A much more interesting film that could pulled out of this concept could involve having the transformation happen much more sooner and then see how the public reacts to it, yet the film goes for conventional “safe” storytelling. A transgender story set in modern times would have also been more interesting, then the route they decided to go. As it is, this film could very much appeal to the older crowd, as it did at the showing I attended, but for those looking for a meaningful film about transgender and it’s affects, I don’t think this is the movie for them. It certainly wasn’t for me.

4 / 10

Edited March 8, 2016 by Daniel Dylan Davis

[Goffe]

they (meaning director and actors) try real hard, but ultimately can't overcome the godawful script. 40/100

Edited August 19, 2016 by Goffe

[Noctis]

Unbelievably bland, aside from the two leads (particularly Vikander).

 

C

[baumer]

On 27/02/2016 at 10:02 PM, Blankments said:

Nothing about The Danish Girl works. The direction is bland. Redmayne's performance is hammy and completely unbelievable. The script is generic at points and cringeworthy for the rest. The score is more fitting for a horror movie than anything meant to be empowering. By the time the postscript shows up before the credits, you will be upset for Lili Elbe that such a horrendous film is her legacy. It's an actively insulting piece of cinema, and not that enjoyable to watch. The only person that escapes the trainwreck unscathed is Alicia Vikander, who gives a good performance considering the material, but that can't save this disaster. The Danish Girl is awful and an insult to all things celluloid. F

 

I didn't really care for it either, but it's not nearly bad enough to be an F?

[Blankments]

There's really nothing good to be found here really; it's also disturbing how it portrays transgender issues in wholly inaccurate ways

 

There are certainly worse films (even within 2015 itself) but this is still trash