Eddie Redmayne plays Garbo

Rating: 7/10 (6 January 2016)

I found this a touching movie to sit through yesterday, but upon reflection today it's harder to take it quite as seriously as it takes itself. The early cross-dressing scenes have much of the charm of a Mozart opera,but during the many mirror-gazing scenes leading up to Eddie Redmayne's sex-change surgery, I began thinking of Greta Garbo, to whom the cameramen of her day also gave long moments of soulful introspection.
Ben Whishaw also has an androgynous beauty; was he in the running for the lead role? Alicia Vikander's transition from wife to best friend, well played, is perhaps over-romanticised. Tom Hooper's 2010 Oscar/Bafta-winner THE KING'S SPEECH had the added charm of humanising our lofty Royals. In THE DANISH GIRL he's trying to do the opposite, to 'mystify' a pair of artistic misfits, and he succeeds, but less fluently.
The cinematography is superb, creating harbour-scapes of Copenhagen that have the luminosity of Turner paintings. The film is only a little too long, a little too slow and maybe tries a little to hard to wring our heartstrings. But wring them it does.