Tom Hooper’s film about the painter Lili Elbe is handsome, kind and well acted, and far too tidy for the life it is telling. Eddie Redmayne is at his best in the quiet early scenes; Alicia Vikander carries the rest.
Tom Hooper’s film, from Lucinda Coxon’s screenplay of David Ebershoff’s novel, tells the story of Lili Elbe, the Danish painter who in the 1920s became one of the first people to transition medically. It is a kind film, a handsome one and a well acted one, and it is too careful by half. Every room is lit for a portrait and every scene ends on the right face. We left admiring it and not quite believing it.
The early scenes are the good ones. Gerda asks Einar to stand in for a late model, and Redmayne’s foot finds the satin shoe, and his hand goes to the stocking at the knee, and for a few seconds the film stops being a biopic and becomes a person discovering something. We were moved, properly, before the film had decided to be moving, and it was all in Redmayne’s hands and the way he does not look at Vikander. Later, when he studies women through the glass of a Paris peep show and copies their gestures, he is doing the same work and it is just as good.
The trouble comes when the film asks him to be Lili in full. Hooper shoots her in mirrors, through doorways, at the far end of corridors, always slightly posed, and Coxon’s dialogue starts telling us what the face has already shown. Lili is lovely to look at and we rarely learn what she wants on a given afternoon beyond being Lili. She is admired by the camera more than she is known by it, and that is the film’s central failure.
Vikander is the reason to stay. Her Gerda is practical, funny, jealous, frightened, and in love with someone who is leaving by degrees while still in the house. She gets the one marital scene that stings, a row in which Gerda says she needs her husband and Lili cannot give him back, and Vikander plays it without raising her voice. Ben Whishaw is tender and sly in his two or three scenes as Henrik. Matthias Schoenaerts is warm as Hans and has almost nothing to do but be warm. Sebastian Koch, as the surgeon Warnekros, is sober and decent, which is what the part needs.
It is beautifully made. Danny Cohen shoots Copenhagen in pale greys and ochres, with the figures pushed to one side of wide frames and a lot of wall above their heads, the way Hooper likes. Eve Stewart gives the Wegeners a studio of tall windows and leaning canvases, and a Paris flat of green panelling and gilt. Paco Delgado’s clothes do real work: Gerda in trousers and a bob, Lili in drop-waisted dresses and cloche hats, and the film’s whole argument about who is becoming whom is in the wardrobe before anyone says it aloud. Alexandre Desplat’s score, piano over soft strings, is handsome and insistent, and it arrives at every emotional turn to make sure we have noticed it.
Melanie Oliver cuts the second half as a run of lovely, dissolving scenes, and the effect is of a very expensive photograph album. Nearly everyone Lili meets is understanding. The one doctor who is not is dealt with in a scene and gone. The film has sanded off whatever was hard or strange or awkward about these lives, and by the last half hour we were watching the light on the water and waiting to be told it was over.
Hooper made The King’s Speech (2010) and Les Misérables (2012), and this has the same decorum, the same conviction that good taste and a crying close-up are the same thing. Redmayne was freer in The Theory of Everything (2014) because that film let him be difficult. Here he is only ever allowed to be brave.
See it for Vikander, for the stockings scene and for Delgado’s frocks. Watch it at home, where its stateliness becomes gentleness and the score can be turned down. It runs 119 minutes and carries a 15.
