I'm Eating a Danish, Girl

Rating: 7/10 (13 July 2016)

A well-intentioned and certainly topical film that's prevented from being better than it could be by Tom Hooper's relentless commitment to being a boring director.
Eddie Redmayne acts up a storm as a Danish painter who begins to experiment with impersonating a woman as a kind of game between he and his wife (Alicia Vikander) until he realizes that the game has awoken something dormant in him and he decides to live his life as a woman, complete with a physical transformation at a time when such a thing was extremely dangerous to attempt.
Vikander won an Oscar for playing one of the Academy's favorite character types -- the nobly suffering wife, and in this case, the most understanding spouse in the history of civilization. Redmayne also received an Oscar nomination, as did the film's handsome production design and costumes.
The acting is good enough and the material compelling enough on its own to engage its audience's interest, but it can't dust off the patina of tasteful masterpiece theatre that Hooper is determined to apply to it.
Grade: B