With his lush settings, yieldingly gentle tones and exquisite sense of visual design, the director Tom Hooper has developed something of a house style. Having directed “The King’s Speech” and “Les Miserables,” the filmmaker has emerged as someone who’s less instinctively cinematic than pictorial, not communicating by way of moving images, but by creating backdrops — usually involving an artfully distressed wall — for high-toned, affecting performances.
All of Hooper’s strengths and weaknesses are on display in “The Danish Girl,” a tasteful, tender but oddly inert portrait of the early transgender pioneer Lili Elbe, who when the movie opens in 1920s Copenhagen, is a modestly well-known painter named Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne). Together with his wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander), who is also a painter, Wegener enjoys a life of bohemian self-expression, if not hedonism.
They genuinely love each other, even when he wistfully touches his wife’s camisoles, or adjusts her lipstick for her, and a frisson flutters to life. When Gerda asks Einar to slip on a pair of women’s shoes in order to help her finish a portrait that she’s working on, something clicks.
On a lark, they attend a party as two women, where Einar playfully assumes the identity of Lili. From then on, the character abandons the mantle of Einar, eventually accepting the challenge to undergo risky sex-reassignment surgery to “correct a mistake of nature.”
