As so often happens in Hollywood, storytellers sometimes
must put a good story on hold until producers decide audiences are ready to
accept them, and therefore pay money to go and see them. Gail Mutrux had to
wait fifteen years for this story to be told; Eddie Redmayne only four.
Society, it seems, is moving in the right direction, and it’s thanks to
political and social LGBTQ progress and bold TV shows like Transparent and Orange is the New
Black. And yet it would be doing the story, the movie, and the performances –
especially that of Alicia Vikander – a disservice to bracket The Danish Girl
simply a transgender story. It is, of course, but at its core it’s a study of
human relationships and the nature of love.
In that sense the movie has similarities to Hooper’s The King’s Speech.
“I think in both movies, the central character is able to overcome their difficulties
because they’re truly seen by those closest to them,” suggests Hooper, “In The
King’s Speech, Colin Firth’s character has this wonderful relationship with
Lionel Logue, and in The Danish Girl it’s [wife] Gerda’s love for Lili that allows her
to go on this journey of identity."
Gerda is played in the movie by Alicia Vikander and the
Swedish actress steals the show with a wonderfully poignant performance - not
bad considering she first read about the movie in the trade papers. Tom Hooper
remembers the moment she walked in for a screen test, “The very first take [of
the screen test] with Eddie, she was so powerful that I had tears in
my eyes by the end of it." Hooper, unsurprisingly, gave her the role on
the spot. And it’s her chemistry with Redmayne, and the subtley in which she
conveys the heartbreak of losing her husband that anchors the whole movie –
Lili must make her journey alone, but the audience can only understand it
through Gerda.
Einar’s transition into Lily is surprisingly subtle as well, as
if Lili is already there and simply must be uncovered. It’s something director
Tom Hooper and actor, Eddie Redmayne, discussed at length. “We talked of
revelation rather than transformation,” says Hooper. Redmayne spent a year
preparing for the role and he gives a delicate and sensitive performance –it
was the actor’s “emotional rawness," says Hooper, which made him perfect
for the role. “Lili is never ‘othered’ by Eddie’s performance; the audience is
never made to feel that Lili is strange. [Redmayne] has the ability to take the
audience on the journey with Lili, so much so that the emergence – hopefully –
of Lili becomes inevitable and necessary."
The connection between Hooper and Redmayne goes back to
2005, when the director cast the actor in one of his first screen roles,
Elizabeth I, the HBO miniseries starring Helen Mirren. The Danish Girl is the
third collaboration between the pair and, if Hooper’s track record is anything
to go by, it might not be the last - the director is a firm believer in the
virtues of long term collaboration. The Danish Girl is Hooper’s fifth time
working with production designer Eve Stewart and cinematographer Danny
Cohen, and there is little doubt that this is both a wonderfully designed and
beautifully photographed movie.
One of the key devices by which Einar’s transition into
Lili is shown to the audience is through the paintings by Gerda. It is part of
what makes the story unique, and the purist in Hooper wanted the real paintings
for the movie – the only problem was getting them out of private collector’s
hands. And so began a lengthy dialogue between the production company and the
collectors. In the meantime, Hooper marched on with his plans – casting actors,
scouting locations, rehearsing actors. With a month to go until filming the
collectors hadn't budged and Hooper was facing a crisis – his purist vision up
in smoke. Eve Stewart, in one fell swoop, identified both the problem and the
solution, “Eve pulled me to one side and said, ‘you do realize that the real Lili
paintings aren't Eddie Redmayne.'” Hooper puts his head in his hands and
shudders at the remembrance. The solution in the end was Eddie Redmayne
sitting, as Lili, for British muralist Susannah Brough, who painted over forty
portraits, many of which are used in the film. The paintings are integral to
the nature of the story and they form an indelible part of Lily in the
audience's mind – without them, the story simply wouldn't work.
Tom Hooper was awarded Best Director by the Academy for
The King’s Speech and he’s followed it with another true story – a story which
demanded sensitivity, empathy, and most of all, honesty, and the director
succeeds on all fronts. Eddie Redmayne also won an an Academy Award for his
portrayal of scientist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything last year, and continues his streak with another fine performance. The movie, however, belongs to Alicia Vikander’s Gerda, and
perhaps it’s fitting that the first person to accept Lili should be the one we
remember as we walk out of the theatre.