TIFF 2015 Review | ‘The Danish Girl’ Flakes At The End

The Danish Girl is a work of astounding beauty, bolstered by evocative cinematography, a sensitive screenplay and two powerhouse performances that rank among the best in years. Except the ending, which sucks.

It’s a frustrating situation, attempting to evaluate a four-star dinner with a zero-star finish. Does one focus on the elegant presentation of a nourishing meal, or just on the last two spoonfuls, which sully the whole experience without actually ruining it? The Danish Girl builds to an inevitable dramatic conclusion but suddenly abandons all grace in favor of lazy emotional sucker punches and metaphors so hackneyed they play like a joke. If the conclusion to The Danish Girl had been presented as a fake Oscar hopeful in The Player, it would have been that film’s most hilarious satire.

How unfortunate it is that Tom Hooper, the Academy Award-winning director of The King’s Speech and Les Miserables, finally had material that played less like a “For Your Consideration” clip and more like a meaningful, even important motion picture. One cannot help but project a certain insecurity onto the finale of The Danish Girl, and wonder if this masterful piece of craftsmanship fell prey to a sudden last minute crisis: “Will they get it?” the filmmaker may have wondered. “I’d better make it more punishingly obvious.”

The Danish Girl stars Eddie Redmayne as a Einer Wegener, a celebrated landscape painter in the 1920s. His wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander), is also an excellent painter but she hasn’t found her muse yet. When she asks Einer to fill-in for her latest model – a ballerina, and a no-show – Einer gigglingly puts on her stockings and… trembles.

Related: Watch the Oscar Bait Trailer for ‘The Danish Girl’

Einer and Gerda have, at first, what could be considered a storybook romance. She even embraces Einer’s unexpected desire to wear women’s clothes. It’s when Einer, taking the guise of his non-existent cousin Lili, traipses off in the middle of a party and kisses another man that Gerda begins to worry. Einer doesn’t readily acknowledge what has happened, and asks with all sincerity what Lili was up to. 

The Danish Girl is a mystery, in which the solution has been discovered with time and understanding that the characters don’t have. In the 1920s the notion of a transgender was considered a form of madness, if it was even considered at all. Watching Einer transform into Lili, and find true joy for the first time in his life, is inspiring. Watching him succumb to the doubts and fears imbued by his historical period is tragic. Watching Gerda gradually accept Einer’s true nature is beautiful. Watching her despair that the person she married is becoming someone else entirely is nearly horrifying.

The power of The Danish Girl lies in the performances, true. Redmayne and Vikander evoke roiling swarms of complex emotions. But the real wonder here is Lucinda Coxon’s incredible screenplay, adapted from David Ebershoff’s novel, which finds sympathy for all sides and suspense through uncertainty. There’s an impressive absence of finger-wagging from nearly 100 years in the future, scoffing at ignorant previous generations which are helpless to defend themselves (and without much of a defense anyway). The characters in The Danish Girl didn’t know any better, until some of them threw off convention and conventional moralizing and learned something new. The world is a more understanding place for it.

So again, the pain in the ass is that The Danish Girl could be so richly aware and yet so utterly tone deaf, right at the end. The point it makes is still valid, even poignant, but ultimately conveyed with all the mawkishness of a comedian explaining their own punchlines. We get it, The Danish Girl, you want us to leave the theater crying. But we were already crying, and you made us want to snicker instead.

Images via Focus Features

William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.

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