Today's Review: The Danish Girl

Finally another review for FilmTotaal:

The Danish Girl - Recensie

Basically this movie embodies wasted potential. There's a capable director and a number of wonderful actors, some with notable award winning accolades to their name, attached to this film, but it just doesn't manage toengage the audience. It looks great, but it doesn't feel so. If transgenders are looking for a movie that illustrates their long plight and continuing calls for understanding and acceptance for their cause, I fear this is not it.

The strongest reason of its failure as such, is that it's simply too clean, too good looking. Though Eddie Redmayne looks androgynous enough to get away with playing both sexes effectively, his Einar's/Lili's long road from man to woman, though destined to end in tragedy, simply is too easy, certainly for the times we are dealing with. Yes, he's forced to leave his own country in search for a more accepting environment and yes, he's looked upon by medical minds as a freak of nature, sick in spirit and in desperate need of a gruesome cure, but the progresion of the movie doesn't live up to the many decades of violent misunderstanding if not downright cruelty inflicted on transgenders. Lili is surrounded by caring people who all too easily accept her plight and encourage her to do what she feels she should do, despite the danger this will place her in and the hardship it causes those closed to her, especially her loving wife who never signed up for this when they got married and who is finally enjoying some professional success. The scene with the physicians looking to operate on Lili with force to "cure" her woes is played more for laughs, though historically there's nothing funny about this sort of medicine which could be described as blatant torture. The only time Lili is physically confronted with her otherness is when she's beaten up on the street by two random hoodlums. Other than that, as transgender drama goes, this one is surprisingly happy.

But despite these shortcomings, The Danish Girl has all the hallmarks of a solid period piece. It's capably directed, just not memorably so, unlike director Tom Hooper's own The King's Speech. Costume and set design is top notch, nobody will deny. The lead actors are at the top of their game and their Oscar nominations are well deserved (though I doubt they're good enough for a win), while the supporting cast is equally up to its task. But for all intents and purposes, it's not enough. Emotionally, The Danish Girl underwhelms, thanks to a script that plays it safe and doesn't feel like shocking the audience too strongly. Maybe it feels the notion of transgender struggles is risqué enough as it is for audiences? That would be rather offensive to the people it means to represent, who admittedly won't feel very much represented by it anyway.

Today's Mini-Review: Kapringen

Kapringen: ****/*****, or 7/10

Harrowing tale of a hijacked ship's crew on one side and the ship's company negotiators on the other. A Danish cargo ship is commandeered by Somali pirates who demand 15 million euros ransom. The company's CEO (Søren Malling), against sound advice from a hired expert in hijacking, decides to engage in negotiations with the pirates himself and soon finds himself in too deep where his personal emotions are concerned, which increasingly causes escalations in this dire situation. Meanwhile, the crew of the ship, including the cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbæk), must cope with psychological and violent abuse by the Somalis, while also suffering months of boredom and unhygienic living conditions, including a severe lack of food. However, they form an unlikely bond with their captors, who don't prove to be so inhuman at all (and rather hungry too), just poor, uneducated people driven to extreme action for the most part. Tense scenes of Mikkel being forced to cook for the pirates at gunpoint are interspersed with surprisingly uplifting scenes of the hostages and the Somalis engaging in boisterous song and dance to celebrate the capture and cooking of a fish. However, director Tobias Lindholm makes it perfectly clear that every act of sympathy and generosity the captives receive can be taken from them just as swiftly by their captors due to the ever prolonged negotiation procedures the CEO makes them live through, as he is stalling for time in an effort to bring down the amount of money demanded by the pirates to a more affordable level. Of course the uncertainty suffered by the hostages' families and his decreasing levels of success soon make even him hesitant about a happy outcome, as negotiations seem to rapidly spiral towards a boiling point. Kapringen is a terrific and terrifying movie, executed very realistically. Despite the solid performances this distills from the lead actors, at times realism does hinder the movie's pace since little happens, as it would over the course of four months sitting on a ship that goes nowhere while negotiations have turned so sour that both parties hardly communicate anymore. Nevertheless, the ever more critical situation onboard ship, where the crew has to deal with bored and impatient pirates, does result in many a suspenseful scene, made all the more disturbing by Asbæk's compelling acting. This film is made by the creators of the Danish hit series Borgen and, apart from the good writing of course, it shows: half the cast was featured on that TV-series, so occasionally you start asking yourself, why isn't Danish prime minister Birgitte Nyborg getting herself involved in this affair to save the day?