I honestly was hoping for more pretentiousness

Rating: 3/10 (2 January 2016)

I wanted to write a review of this movie, slamming its pretentiousness and hurling tons of allegory onto its maximum levels of Oscar-Bait that the trailer for this movie strained really hard to get across with all of its criteria: the contemporary message of love for the trans community, the good actors, the period-drama setting, the operatic score. Instead, however, I come to tell of a movie that is so emotionally lacking, so frustratingly distant, and so boring, which is in a way the biggest disappointment for me.
To start off, the film's production design is strong. There was some over-saturation of the colours they use to show this unrealistically colourful world the character's live in, but the costumes are all interesting and engaging. The mis-en-scene and the editing, however, are a mess; Tom Hooper definitely shoots the environment better than his actors, as whenever a conversation is going on, he continually isolates each character to their own separate take and a camera that focuses in on actors with nothing to react to. This, combined with a continual lack of proper establishing shot, is a terrible choice of how to do the movie; I know he's trying to make them intimate to us, but he fails at making them intimate to each other and, as a result, the audience doesn't care. The editing's a confusing and weird one; there are a much of moments that make no sense. Firstly is a scene where Einar delivers laundry to a woman collecting it, but he does it with such insane speed it makes Usian Bolt look fat and slow (he has to run from one end of their big house to another, after having to tie the bag up tight) and it was so weird you wonder why they included it. Same with the scene where Gerda gets out of a full period costume, including big knee high leather boots, and into another one in the time it takes her husband to paint a smudge on his canvas. But by far the biggest "why the hell" with the editing is a shot when he's first becoming Lili, and it cuts to some water on the floor. There was literally no point except to confuse the audience.
Now onto the biggest issues with this movie - Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander and the script. To start with Alicia, she's great. She honestly is, with both her body of work and her performance in this film as she tries to bring a complete range of colours and shades to this performance as she laughs, smiles, cries, and dances around. The problem is she's trying her damned hardest to add something to nothing. And let's get one thing straight here, this movie treats Gerda Wegener like dirt. She's not a successful artist, she only has a career/notice because of Einar before and after the creation of Lili, and she never, NEVER gets angry, to the point where its insulting as he selfishly pulls himself away from her and into Lili, leaving her absolutely alone. Except for one scene where she pleads with him - "I need my husband. I want to hold my husband", which is said out of frustration than anything else - she never speaks out on any of it, and when she does, he says one sentence then immediately shuts up. It's like the fantasy of what people hope for other people to be, rather than them actually being it - that scene where she first finds him wearing her nightgown and then immediately starts banging him is so insultingly, unrealistically forgiving that it hurt me. Mr Redmayne now. First of all, whilst I thought that he did do a good job in The Theory of Everything, I did think the Oscar was more appropriate in the hands of Michael Keaton or Jake Gyllenhaal. In this movie, I have the exact same issue as I did with that movie; he only tries with the difficult stuff i.e. the actually being a woman, or actually having Motor Neurone Disease, but the other times he is just a flat page delivering things awkwardly and not really acting. The problem with this is that his Stephen Hawking got ALS in the first 20 minutes of that film and he could really do his thing, but in this, he becomes a woman in the last 10 minutes. Those 10 minutes are wonderful, but it doesn't warrant an Oscar - or any award to be honest. He's a coy, fluttering, meek person who doesn't really change personally throughout the film beyond the physical nature of it. The script is full of lines that are over-shadowing the theme of the story, but not in a good way; lines like "It was like I was kissing myself" or "I'm worried you'll look at that picture so long you'll disappear into it" are cringy and not clever.
Apart from one scene in a Prostitute peep show, where Einar ends up mimicking the woman's movements as she observes and goes from weirded out to curious to understanding to sorry, the whole film grated for me badly. It's boring, distant and while it was just under 2 hours, I thought I'd been there longer
You want to go see it, be my guest. But if this wins an Oscar - especially for Best Actor, which something of this calibre doesn't warrant - then I hit the floor.