Delicate, amazing performances; love breaks your heart again

Rating: 9/10 (18 January 2016)

You (like me) may have admired Eddie Redmayne in the TV version of Tess of the D'Urbervilles (2008), in My Week with Marilyn (2011), as Marius in Les Miserables 2012), and as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything (Academy Award, 2014). You still may be surprised at how moving his delicate performance is in The Danish Girl. I knew vaguely what this movie was about—very "loosely based" on the lives of mid-1920s Danish painters Einar and Gerda Wegener. Despite their happy and loving marriage, Einar comes to realize he is a woman in a man's body. "Lili," as his alter ego is named, is at first a diversion for the pair, then a painful inevitability, and Einar becomes one of the first people to undergo sex-reassignment surgery. Both of them suffer because of Lili's condition and the strains it places on their love, yet they desperately try to make some kind of relationship work. Yet it's dangerous to be a pioneer. While Redmayne is superb, he's matched in nuanced expressiveness by Swedish actor Alicia Vikander as Gerda. The delicious Matthias Schoenaerts plays Einar's childhood friend, Hans, with whom a frantic Gerda reconnects while the couple is in Paris. Ben Whishaw also appears, determined to court the shy Lili, or is it Einar he recognizes and pursues? Not much was known about transgender identities in 1925, and the medical practitioners with whom the couple shares its secret propose predictably draconian measures. But the real drama is watching Redmayne transform himself into a female being. Says Nathan Heller's Vogue article, "He is no longer recognizable as a 33-year-old man; suddenly, the flash strikes his face and the transformation is complete." The film, directed by Tom Hooper with a script by English playwright Lucinda Coxon, is based on the 2000 David Ebershoff novel. Due to Coxon's diligent research, the movie actually contains numerous factual details not in the book. Tim Gray's interview with Coxon for Variety reveals that the film is actually closer to what really happened than either the novel or Lili Elbe's pastiche of a "memoir," which was, Coxon told Gray, "a work of many hands."