Melodramatic Mania

Rating: 4/10 (26 November 2016)

The Danish Girl, the weakest movie from the 2016 Oscars and a movie I'm going to remember for all the wrong reasons.
The Danish Girl isn't a particularly bad film nor is it a good one by contrast. This movie tries too hard to make you feel emotionally attached to the main character. Unfortunately, it doesn't do it correctly. The main character, Einar, is too one dimensional. The only things he loves is his wife and his paintings. He has little to lose since his wife loves him unconditionally. Through events in the movie, Einar discovers that he is a woman at heart and wants to expand on his feelings. It's sloppy, questionable, and never addresses how he has never felt this way before.
Like a binary switch, Einar now has two personalities completely different from one another. It feels contrived and forced. The movie could have used this opportunity to expand on Einar as a character, adding more depth and complexity to his persona. However, they rely on his femininity as a crutch, expecting you to feel emotionally bound based on empathy. The movie forcefully has an unnecessary fist fight just to make the audience feel more pity, more empathetic, and more attached to this character. It rubs off as contrived and concocted, the audience is bound to this character via their natural reaction to feel empathy to someone weak, but in reality this just masks the odor beneath. the character is unrelatable, has little to lose, has little depth or complexity, and little to nothing interesting.
The visually pleasing camera work hides its very simplistic story. The movie makes its final attempt to pull on your heartstrings by having Einar die after his operation is completed. The ending doesn't sit right with me as an audience member and made me feel questioned on what exactly I should be sad with. From a cinematic standpoint, Einar didn't have an outstanding relationship with his wife who only truly accepted him at the very end of the film; unfortunately the little sorrow I felt didn't last very long since I never grasped the characters on an emotional level. Emotion bound on purely empathy can be dismissed with nothing more than an acknowledgment.
This movie relies too much on how you feel. The ugly duckling story executed in this movie was bland and overdone. The pleasing and relaxed visuals only hide its very simplistic story. The emotional binding to the characters were cheap and left an artificial taste in my mouth. This movie felt like it was trying to fill in every cliché from using art to bash you over the head with symbolism that has already been established, to cheap fights to make you feel bad.
The Danish Girl, though it made an admirable attempt to imitate a better movie, just doesn't hold up too well on its own merits.
4/10