09 January 2016

LOST IN TRANSITION

May the Film Internet forgive me, but I honestly, reliably enjoy the visuals in director Tom Hooper's movies. I like the way he and his regular cinematographer, Danny Cohen, kept shunting the actors into weird corners of the frame in The King's Speech to suggest the main character's sense of discomfort in the world; I like their use of shallow-focus close-ups all throughout Les Misérables as a way of reducing the impersonally epic scale of a Broadway megamusical down to a series of moments experienced by individual characters.

I even like a lot of the images in The Danish Girl, Hooper's latest film and believe it or not, his most Oscarbaity yet. There's an early scene in which Danish painter Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne), who has not yet had the realisation that he's* a woman born into a man's body, is framed in a tiny corner of frames full of gauzy dress material, and I elect to regard this as a nifty, on-point bit of foreshadowing in addition to being lovely to look at. Not much latter, there's a scene where Einar's wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander) stands by a door in a hallway, and it's a very King's Speech-ey image whose oddball framing gives a shot of adrenal tension. So I apologise, but I will continue to regard Hooper as interesting & not the pustulant canker on the art of cinema that he's typically written off as being.

Interesting or not, Hooper is exactly the wrong director for this material. His style is one of extreme exteriority, and The Danish Girl - being a biopic of Lili Elbe, one of the first trans women to undergo sexual reassignment surgery, and mostly about the effect this had on her marriage - is inherently driven by an interior conflict. It takes a great deal of sensitivity and minutely sophisticated style to tease that kind of thing out; doubly so for the most prominent film about a transgender character in a year that found transgender issues launching into the forefront of the cultural dialogue in the United States. What we get in The Danish Girl are shots of Redmayne looking down at his legs in woman's stockings with an expression of stunned arousal, while Alexandre Desplat's terrible, terrible music bleats its way through the string section (I have to say that while I was prepared to be annoyed by many things in The Danish Girl, I was especially not prepared for one of those things to be the worst score Desplat has ever composed).

In point of sober fact, the film is technically a literary adaptation, not a biopic: it's based on David Ebershoff's 2000 novel based on the lives of Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener, meaning we're at two removes of fiction. And that, anyway, explains in part how it could be that the film elects to make both characters so very much less interesting than their real-life counterparts - Wegener especially, who had a pretty complex interior life and sexual identity herself, and who absolutely deserved more than to be cast as the Long-Suffering Wife in the latest variation on the stock Pollock/A Beautiful Mind framework for telling rigidly formalised stories about real people.

Though in fact, The Danish Girl tweaks that formula in a manner that somehow makes it even less interesting. Gerda is, beyond question, considered only in terms of how she relates to Einar/Lili: at first as a sympathetic co-conspirator helping her husband express a new set of feelings right under the noses of polite society, as she encourages him to go out into the world as Lili; later as an advocate helping to track down sympathetic doctors and forcing the world around them to be accepting, as Lili realises that Einar, if he ever existed, is now gone; last a tearful martyr who understands that her relationship with Lili cannot be like her relationship to Einar, and the person she loved is no longer available to her. The early feints at depicting Gerda's busy, burgeoning career as a painter quickly retrenches to window dressing; the late introduction of Hans Axgil (Matthias Schoenaerts), a childhood friend of Einar and current art dealer, to be Gerda's emotional support and new lover at least gives Vikander some kind of thing to do that isn't looking wistfully at Redmayne, but it's pretty thin stuff that the film openly treats as a distraction to the A-plot.

What's weird about this is that, for all that Gerda is cast almost exclusively in a reactive role, stripped of all but the semblance of an independent identity behind "person who was married to Lili Elbe before Elbe transitioned", she's also the protagonist of The Danish Girl. Hooper, recall, can't quite figure out a way to let us into Lili's head, and Lucinda Coxon's screenplay (one of several versions she wrote over the course of a decade of development hell; intriguingly, it is apparently one of the older drafts that was adopted as the shooting script) doesn't really demand that we do much with Lili beside sympathise with her - cementing its status as a My First Trans Story for bourgeois liberal art house patrons, The Danish Girl is much too skittish to actually try to inhabit Lili's sense of self - and the viewer's perspective is uniformly lined up with Gerda as a response. This becomes, somewhat by default and probably not on purpose, less about the conflict within Lili and primarily about the conflict between Gerda and her spouse. Though "conflict" is an entirely too strong word for it. Ambivalence, let us say.

I don't suppose there's much of anything wrong with that approach per se, though it's plainly the case that Hooper and company were hoping to make a more dramatic social statement than this ends up being. Drama, anyway, is in greatly short supply: this is a heavily episodic film that doesn't really build up to its climax so much as it finally stumbles into the point in history where Elbe died of an unsuccessful surgery, having run out of repetitive scenes of Redmayne playing exactly one kind of emotion, and Vikander getting to play a whopping two. As for what point in history that is, damned if I can tell: the film's chronology at the very least doesn't seem to map onto reality, nor does it do a sufficient job of demonstrating the passage of time within itself. This is emphatically inert storytelling, with Hooper leading a faultlessly posh production crew (costumes by Paco Delgado, production designed by Eve Stewart) into making a movie that is thoroughly fixed up with the immaculately tasteful shabbiness common to the director's work, and far too primly respectful to actually make demands of the audience or the story. It is a very fucking nice movie, neurotically so, and that makes it awfully damn boring.

Every now and then, the film comes along with a unexpectedly interesting scene. There are the moments when Vikander (who is, by an incredibly lopsided margin, the most effective performer in the movie) pulls out her character's unanticipated erotic response to seeing Einar transform into Lili; there is a scene in which Lili pantomimes with a nude dancer in a peep show, the dancer replacing her own reflection. An obvious image, but well-executed and the only moment in the film's latter half where the visuals are doing anything of even the smallest note. But every time one of these scenes drifts along, something gets in the way: the museum-quality dresses, the limited palette of subdued colors, the damnably easygoing, saccharine score. The Danish Girl is hellbent on being as inoffensive as possible, and it succeeds; but aye me, at such a cost!

5/10

13 comments:

  1. At the risk of opening a can of worms that you might have been going out of your way to avoid, Redmayne's lack of talent aside, what are your thoughts on the criticism of having a cis actor play a trans character?

    I honestly feel it wouldn't bug me as much if we lived in a world where trans-actors had more presence in cinema (playing trans- or cis- roles either way), but it doesn't seem to be such a thing save for Orange Is the New Black and Sense8 and Tangerine and a few others.

    At the same time, I get that there's not much of a way to portray characters in the middle of transition that simply and while of course there definitely trans-people in the world in the middle of transition that could play the role, I don't know how comfortable they'd feel (a lot of the public figures have been very private towards their transition save for Caitlyn Jenner) or if they want to put a lens on themselves like that.

    And of course I'm definitely saying all this from the privilege of being a cis straight white-ish guy, so it's easy for me to say all this but not have the full picture.

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  2. Oh now, blogger recognizes my Wordpress account as STinG606 instead of MovieMotorbreath. These comments be weird.

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  3. That one is above my pay grade. The questions that I don't know the answer to are a) How many trans actors are looking for work? b) How many trans actors would have played this role if it was offered to them? c) How many trans actors would prefer, in an ideal world, to seek out specifically trans roles versus roles where that's not germane?

    That said, if the producers went right to Redmayne without looking in the trans community (and that's almost certainly what they did), I certainly think that was the wrong choice.

    I will say that my concern with the idea that "only trans actors should play trans characters" is that it's fuzzily close to "trans actors should only play trans characters", and that's clearly not okay. My takeaway from Sense8 wasn't "Jamie Clayton has great screen presence, I want to see her play more transwomen", but "Jamie Clayton has great screen presence, I want to see her play a range of different characters".

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  4. Why do people always say Einar/Lili should be played by a trans person? We see the character both pre and post op. That's impossible for a trans person to play unless they have a twin brother (hello Orange is the New Black). The argument is almost as foolish as the one made criticising Eddie Redmayne for playing an ALS character in Theory of Everything instead of getting an ALS person to play the character. Which again, an ALS person couldn't show the process going through stages.

    Also who else thinks the film would be improved if they had the flashback where Einar dressed in female clothing as a child as a prologue at the beginning? It would make "Lili's been here all along" more meaningful at least.

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  5. We see the character both pre and post op. That's impossible for a trans person to play

    That is hilariously bullshit. It's equally "impossible" for a cis person to play, yet you're somehow not worried about Redmayne's acting abilities.

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  6. @notfenimore You can't get a trans actor who has fully made the transition to play the character before the transition or even someone who is currently transitioning through hormonal treatment. For the Danish Girl, you've got to get a male who is willing to fully commit to the role to try and sell the beginnings of that transition.

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  7. And again, I'm not quite sure what your argument is here, beyond "trans women are inherently worse actors than cis men". What, exactly, about the fact that Redmayne (presumably) has to shave in the mornings makes him better at conveying the trans experience than an actual trans actress?

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  8. My argument is that the people who are saying that Einar/Lili Elbe should be played by a trans person aren't taking certain things into account. I'm not saying Transgenders are bad actors or shouldn't get roles (certainly, I'm not a fan of the oscar given to Mr Leto). I'm just saying that for the Danish Girl there is no problem in getting a male to play the part because it helps to sell the transition. I do not believe Redmayne nor the script does a particularly good role at this but it is certainly more realistic and practical than a trans person playing the character before and after transition.

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  9. @J.S. - I hear what you're saying (my bringing it up was merely because it was a point of contention for the movie's publicity, not necessarily out my agreement or disagreement with it), but there are transgender people who have not undergone the process yet and would probably be just as capable of portraying the different the stages as Redmayne.

    My only questions that I don't have answers to is, like Tim, how many of those are actors? And would they truly feel comfortable playing such a role, since it feels imposing to suggest that?

    Overall, though, I don't have a problem with a cis-man playing the role in principle, just thought it was worth thought. What I really have a problem with is REDMAYNE playing the role.

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  10. "I don't have a problem with a cis-man playing the role in principle, just thought it was worth thought. What I really have a problem with is REDMAYNE playing the role."

    I mean, that's it right there. For example, nobody's complaining about Jeffrey Tambor in Transparent (that I know of), because he's actually good.

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  11. Your Resident Grumpy Transgender Commenter chiming in here to say that I (and everyone else in the community I've spoken to about it) strongly oppose the casting of Redmayne in the role. I don't blame Redmayne for it (he's openly said he was only willing to take the role because he knew if he didn't it would just be given to another cis male actor), but it's one of the most overt examples of how casting directors consistently fail trans actors.

    Of course nobody wants to establish a precedent where trans actors are only allowed to play trans roles, but until Hollywood's stops imposing its incredibly limited standards on actresses in general,the least they should be able to do is play a part in telling their own stories. There are plenty of trans actresses, pre-, mid-, or post-transition who would have been ready and willing to play the part, but of course none of them are name-brand actresses, and that more than anything belies the degree to which The Danish Girl is just prestigious Transgender Misery Porn for a middlebrow cisgender audience.

    I have exactly the same issue with Tambor in Transparent, and the fact that Leto and Redmayne are both bad in their respective roles is just adding insult to injury.

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  12. Thanks very much for chiming in! I greatly appreciate the insight. And especially thanks for setting me straight on Transparent.

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  13. Very much appreciated, Chris D. It was getting awkwardly incomplete to have this conversation without the perspective of a transgender person.

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