Note: As you know if you follow me, I’m doing Movie of the Week for a little while because I have to watch a whole bunch of movies right now so I don’t have a lot of time to read.

All the big movies this year are true stories!  Or based very closely on true stories.  Trumbo, Bridge of Spies, Room, Straight Outta Compton, Steve Jobs, The Danish Girl, Beast of No Nation, The Revenant, The Big Short, …  I don’t know why, but there you have it.  So, whether or not these movies are good, they are important.  You should try to see all of them.

I’m going to talk about The Danish Girl this week.  Boy! Eddie Redmayne is just exploding into Hollywood!  Last year, he played Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything and won the Oscar and many other awards for it.  I think he did deserve it, but it is also true that that role was the best vehicle any actor got that year.  Usually, all the nominees are qualified to win the awards, so it often comes down to vehicle that makes the actor stand out.  Like Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie and Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot.

Well, this year, Mr. Redmayne plays the world’s first physically transgender woman.*†  The film is based on the lives of Danish landscape painter Einar Wegener and his wife, Gerga, a portrait painter.  They were very much in love and had a very active sex life.  But Einar turns out to be two people in one body and the other one is a woman.  Once Lili Elbe – the woman – shows herself, it quickly becomes increasingly difficult for Einar to keep her hidden until finally, Einar disappears completely into her.

This is fascinating and heartbreaking to watch, and it’s where Mr. Redmayne’s talent really stands out.  Watching his face as he tries to tries to deal with who he is is wonderful.  You see him study women to see how they move, how they gesture, as though making sure his behavior fits that of the woman he knows he is.

The entire concept of being born in the wrong body simply did not exist in the 1930s, so poor Gerda Wegener – wonderfully played by Alicia Vikander – has no idea how to deal with this.  She is losing her husband and she doesn’t even know why.  She certainly doesn’t know how to deal with it.

The trigger for Lili to emerge is Greta, also a painter, has him pose for her when her female model doesn’t show up.  Further into the movie, Greta asks, “Did I do this to you?” and of course she didn’t.  And of course, she still feels like she did.

When Einar realizes he is not a man, he fights it, of course.  To accept it would be to admit to insanity, even though he knows he is not insane.  But again, the concept did not exist at the time.  As she herself (pronouns become a bit of an issue in such a situation) wrote in her diary, “I said to myself that as my case has never been known in the history of the medical art, it simply did not exist, it simply could not exist.”

In 1919, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld had founded the German Institute of Sexual Science, so Lili and Gerta went to him (Dr. Kurt Warnekros both performed some surgeries, and he represents both doctors in the movie.).  Getra is about as supportive as a wife could possibly be in this situation and at this time.  In fact, if there’s one thing about the movie that doesn’t quite ring true, that would be it.  I like to think a lot of scenes that show Gerda figuring it out and coming acceptance of it were cut.  Otherwise, it just wasn’t handled adequately, in my opinion.

Like the other movies I’ve reviewed this month, it is very, very good.  It’s not great, but again, it is important.

*Sources disagree on whether she was the first.
† I say physically transgender because a person does not have to have the surgery to be transgender.