Despite being awful, Redmayne is getting and was always going to get a ton of praise for this movie. This inevitable praise comes because playing gay or trans is still seen as a courageous thing for a cisgender actor to do, and that viewpoint exists because, deep down, this is still seen as self-debasement. There’s a lot of different ways this gets dressed up, but the fact is Hollywood hates LGBTs just as much as it hates women and minorities and in just the same ways, and this movie and others like it are born exclusively from this hatred. Photos courtesy Focus Features.
It’s the most cynical thing in the world. Former Oscar winners? Check. Based on a true story set in the early 1900s? Check. Gay* person that dies? Check.
The Danish Girl was set up to be one of the most insufferably pretentious movies ever made, but it is surprisingly tolerable, almost entirely because of Alicia Vikander.
The film tells the story of Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne), who became the first known person to undergo gender correction surgery in 1931 to become Lili Elbe**. Wegener and his wife, Gerda (Vikander), come up with Elbe as a joke when he dresses up as a woman for one of her portraits. From there, Wegener’s latent desire to become a woman takes hold, and the majority of the movie is spent focusing on his suffering through gender dysphoria, a condition that wouldn’t even be recognized until 1980, let alone studied, and the dissolution of his and Gerda’s marriage. Elbe — Lili Ilse Elvenes, her name was in real life — eventually underwent one of the first recorded gender transition surgeries, but died of organ rejection after the final surgery to implant a uterus.
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