Avoiding the Pain, Settling for the Surface

“The Danish Girl” is an oddly unmoving film. The subject is brave: the true story of a Danish man who risks sex-reassignment surgery in the 1920s with his wife's support. Yet somehow most of the emotional power the movie might have had is buried under director Tom Hooper's lavish, tasteful production and his determined avoidance of anything probing or unpleasant. 

When the film opens, Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) is a somewhat successful landscape painter married to Gerda (Alicia Vikander), a painter of portraits that sell poorly. They love each other, but we know something is amiss when he adjusts her lipstick or strokes camisoles wistfully. When Gerda asks Einar to slip into a pair of stockings and high heels and a white dress to help her finish a portrait commission, there is a palpable feeling that something has changed.

On a lark, Gerda and Einar, dressed as a woman named Lili, attend a party where no one notices a guest in drag. Indeed, another guest, Henrik (Ben Whishaw), hits on Lili with conversation and a kiss. Even though Einar flees in confusion, his need to find a true self grows quickly and strongly. Ironically so does Gerda's career as she begins painting female nudes with Lili's yearning face. Eventually Einar, now living openly as Lili, decides to have the dangerous surgery.

Hooper has always made movies — “The King's Speech, “Les Miserables” — that are gorgeous backdrops for fine acting. As you would expect, Redmayne, who won the 2015 best actor Oscar for impersonating Stephen Hawking, morphs into Lili with the ease and grace of a butterfly. (Of course it helps that he is almost pretty in real life.) Watching him look for signs, signals, gestures of women around him is perhaps the most memorable part of the film. He is learning how to act as a woman for the rest of his life.

But if Redmayne's performance is memorable for its audacity and confidence — and, really, can you think of another actor who could have taken on this role — Vikander's is the deeper. Her Gerda, mixes love, sympathy, confusion, understanding, her own needs and expectations, even social convention, in a complex, even spiky performance. 

Yet this is a movie that settles for surface. We never move into the darker, more difficult aspects that must have been part of Einar and Gerda's journey. Instead they are presented as models of enlightenment and acceptance. They come across as paragons more than people living in Hooper's impeccable world of good taste and beauty. 

“The Danish Girl” will open in our area soon. It is rated R.