Rating: There's Oscar bait, then there's The Danish Girl. Tom Hooper's latest period prestige picture is a complete bore, a proper watch-looker and the inexplicable Oscar-winning director's worst, most blatant attempt to get more unearned trophies on his mantle. The film chronicles the life of Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe, played by Eddie Redamyne, a Danish painter who was one of the first people to receive sexually reassignment surgery. Can't get a story more awards friendly than that, and when you look deeper it only gets worse. Now, to be fair, there are a lot of Oscar-y elements that have come about purely by accident - Redmayne won his own award after being cast, nobody could have guessed Alicia Vikander's (who plays Wegener's wife, Gerda) star would rise quite so much in the last twelve months, the movie has been in production since before transgender issues became a headline topic - but that doesn't hide that there's also a lot of cynical filmmaking decisions too that ensure, while in theory getting so much right on paper, the movie is nothing more than a desperate attempt to get a bit of high-end praise. Here's a look at why.
