Good acting, but script mish-mashed too many themes

Rating: Null/10 (14 December 2015)

Tom Hooper, a specialist in period/costume pieces who has no particular theme or identity running through his work, bit off more than he could chew with this adaptation of "The Danish Girl". Perhaps working from a true story was his undoing, as the script was all over the place when it should have been laser-like in focusing on a topical and personal subject.
This is an interesting case of a movie that does not live up to its potential, in that the audience is primed to like it, identify with the characters and rooting all the way. Unless there is someone who meticulously goes to movies randomly (I used to be that guy decades ago when I was a fanatic who went to virtually EVERY new release), the ticket buyer is primed for a trans-gender storyline. No "The Crying Game" surprise/gimmick reveal here.
The first few reels confused me as to the filmmakers' stance, in that our protagonist's tactile attraction to fabrics and specifically women's clothing, encouraged by his playful wife, was textbook fetishism, and implied the subject was going to be transvestism, not transsexualism, two distinctly different lifestyles and genres. Even more unsettling was the seemingly unintentional, almost random, shifting of points of view between the two characters - by the end of the film I was personally rooting for and identifying not with Redmayne and his issues, but rather with his wife so skilfully played (and unlike typical Redmayne bravura, underplayed) by Vikander.
My favorite film on the subject of artists competing and one overshadowing the other is not "Amadeus" but rather Ken Russell's usually (and unfairly) maligned "Mahler". In that film there is a classic fantasy-like (as is nearly all of that film and most of Ken's work) scene of Alma Mahler burying her own sheet music in a small pen-case, the little funeral resembling that of kids' burying pet birds in a children's film. In "Danish Girl" of course it is the wife who becomes the celebrated artist, portrayed at the expense of exploiting her husband in his alter ego aspect modeling for her as Lily, his female self trapped in the same body. This inversion where the wife is the bad hat rather than the usual overbearing husband in a pair of artists-relationship (see "Frida Kahlo") was fascinating, but overpowered the Redmayne story for me.
Thls nostalgia (or "Nostalghia") aspect of the movie with its lovely settings, made the climactic shot of Vikander discovering the childhood line of trees that obsessed her painter husband his whole life was quite moving, but again a tangent that overwhelmed other themes. I didn't buy into the main premise of the script at all, namely that it is better (my interpretation inferred from the movie's structure) to live one day self-realized as what you would like to be than to achieve longevity in a rut, a square peg stuck in a round hole (forgive my metaphor). I live in a rut and perhaps masochistically enjoy it - my life has covered several ruts, as I changed careers, goals and focus, but I comfortably settled into my new rut each time. Had the true-life story had Redmayne live happily ever after as a woman, perhaps remarrying with a new true love (sounds like Stephen Hawking again?), that I could buy, but it didn't happen that way in real life. That is why I prefer straight fiction, in which nitpicking over "not true to the story" becomes irrelevant since there is no true story.
Lastly, I have been watching quite a bit of XXX trans-gender videos lately, ranging from the intelligent (Nica Noelle's highly sympathetic features) to other less advanced more exploitation-minded directors such as Dana Vespoli and Joey Silvera. They all deal, aimed at a niche porn market, with trans-gender females' love affairs with males, or cis women or even other trans-gender females. In this currently popular Adult genre, the protagonists are living as women and unlike Redmayne's styling in "Danish Girl" often look clothed exactly like women and more beautiful than their cis peers. But they all retain male genitalia, not having had the operations mentioned in the Hooper film.
A mainstream film dealing with trans-gender people who choose that route, rather than the fatalistic approach of Redmayne's character (who clearly came to abhor his "male parts" to the extent I was fearful of a Vincent Van Gogh-styled knife cutoff self- mutilation scene) is something I look forward to. Hollywood pap ranging from "The Christene Jorgensen Story" to Barry Mahon's "I Was a Man" better traversed the full real-life sex-change genre than Hooper's misguided "Danish Girl".