Another Oscar Bait From The Director Of The King's Speech & Les Misérables

Rating: Null/10 (1 February 2016)

Advertised as a "true story" in spite of being adapted from the fiction novel of the same name, The Danish Girl is an awfully constructed, historically inaccurate & thoroughly lifeless feature film from the director of The King's Speech & Les Misérables and, just like those two period pieces, qualifies as yet another Oscar bait from Tom Hooper.
Loosely inspired by the lives of Danish painters Lili Elbe & Gerda Wegener, The Danish Girl narrates a fictionalised account of the two and focuses on their relationship as their marriage & professional lives undergo a complete transformation when Lili accepts herself for who she is and opts for a sex reassignment surgery, thus becoming one of the first recipients of the procedure.
Directed by Tom Hooper, The Danish Girl masks itself as a biopic of Lili Elbe yet is more concerned with Gerda's difficulty in coming to terms with her partner's identity. The novel itself discards many known facts about its real-life figures thus rendering them purely fictional characters and yet, the filmmakers choose to not correct the mistakes and still have the audacity to sell it as a true story.
The set pieces & costumes are in sync with its timeline, the camera hovers through some beautiful landscapes yet fails to penetrate the hollow people inhabiting this picture, the plot is unnecessarily stretched and while Alexandre Desplat's score is mesmerising, it is more focused on Gerda instead of Lili. Eddie Redmayne does well with what he's asked to play but the finest performance belongs to Alicia Vikander.
On an overall scale, The Danish Girl is so full of Oscar bait characteristics that it doesn't even care about getting its facts right and leaves out the elements that may have hurt its chances of winning a few awards. Being advertised as a bold journey of a transgender pioneer, it's a film about straight people despite what it claims to be. A dull, overlong & horribly misguided cinema that's as insulting to the transgender community as it is to the legacy of Lili Elbe, The Danish Girl is worth skipping.