Tag: (Eddie Redmayne

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The Danish Girl

Eddie Redmayne won last year’s Academy Award for Best Actor with his portrayal of astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. Portraying Hawking’s slowly wasting body while communicating the brilliance of his mind carried an extremely high degree of difficulty, and Redmayne demonstrated incredible physical discipline to pull it off. Director Tom Hooper surely saw that uncanny skill set when he cast the actor to play Lili Elbe, the pioneering, tragic figure at the center of his historical drama The Danish Girl, and there’s a pretty good chance that Redmayne will bring home his second Best Actor Oscar in a row.

Eddie Redmayne blurs the line between acting and dance and the masculine and feminine.

Lili Elbe started life as Einar Wegener, a renown landscape painter living in 1920s Copenhagen with his wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander). The pair are inseparable, and Einar will do anything for his bride, including posing in women’s clothing to help her paint a portrait of a ballerina. That slightly racy but seemingly innocuous gesture sets off something deep in Einar’s psyche, and Gerda — up for a little kink like any good bohemian artist-type worth her salt — is more than happy to play along. But things start to get weird when Gerda and Einar take their game public, when she convinces him to dress as a woman as they attend a Copenhagen artist’s ball. The alter ego they create, a provincial Danish girl name Lili, gradually begins to take over Einar’s personality, testing the limits of their love and society’s acceptance of transgendered people.

Alicia Vikander as Gerda

Redmayne’s performance blurs the line between acting and dance as he conveys Einar/Lili’s fluid sexual identity with alternately masculine and feminine postures and gestures. It’s an amazing performance, made even more heartrending when paired with Vikander’s deeply empathetic Gerda. The pair create a little bubble of possibility and acceptance in the stifling European conservatism that infects even the artistic circles in which they run.

Like Hooper’s 2010 film The King’s Speech, The Danish Girl is solidly constructed but suffers from the usual period-costume-drama maladies of padded length and occasional preciousness. But unlike Hooper’s 2012 adaptation of Les Misérables, it avoids big, baffling missteps — like letting Russell Crowe sing. The cinematography is lush and fashionable — I think this is the only time I’ve ever written “Nice lens choice!” in my notebook. If seeing a pair of world-class actors surrounded by impeccable art design create fully rounded characters sounds like a good time to you, then The Danish Girl is not to be missed.

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Academy Awards Spread The Love

The results of last night’s Academy Awards ceremony defy an easily articulated narrative, except to emphasize that 2014 was actually a great year for films. The acting categories went pretty much as expected, with J.K. Simmons and Patricia Arquette winning handily in the supporting roles, and Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne both landing lead role statues for portraying people with progressive, debilitating diseases. (For the record, Moore was brilliant in Still Alice, but Reese Witherspoon’s Wild was a better film in every way.) 

Best Picture winner Birdman.

Among the Best Picture nominees, no one film ran away with the evening. Selma won only Best Original Song for “Glory”, allowing Common and John Legend to give one of the best speeches of the night. SImilarly, American Sniper won only for Sound Editing. There seemed to be a Grand Budapest Hotel wave forming early, as the Wes Anderson film cleaned up in the design and costuming categories, but the tide turned when Birdman beat GBH for Best Original Screenplay. I had expected a Best Director/Best Picture split, with Richard Linklater taking director honors for his masterpiece Boyhood and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman winning the big prize, but Birdman pitched a shutout in the top line categories. Truthfully, all of the Best Picture nominees were worthy, so the indie hero Linklater and Selma‘s director Ava DuVernay had the misfortune to drop great movies into a very tough field. At least Citizenfour was vindicated with a Best Documentary win, even if it did come at the cost of Finding Vivian Maier. 

To me, it’s another, less closely watched category that shows the strength of filmmaking in 2014. After The Lego Movie‘s inexplicable non-nomination, Disney won both the Best Animated Feature with Big Hero Six and the Best Animated Short with “Feast”, the adorable dog movie to end all adorable dog movies. 

Academy Awards Spread The Love

But when the Oscar Shorts categories was screened by On Location Film Festival earlier this year, there was a clear winner in the animated category, and that was the brilliantly inventive and surprisingly deep “A Single Life”. 

A SINGLE LIFE – TRAILER from Job, Joris & Marieke on Vimeo.

Academy Awards Spread The Love (2)

I guess if you’ve got to lose, you might as well lose to a cute dog. 

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Film Features Film/TV

The Theory Of Everything

Even in a century of scientist heroes that includes Einstein, Salk, and Bohr, Stephen Hawking stands out. He was the first to try to reconcile the very large world of relativity with the very small world of quantum mechanics. He helped prove that black holes exist, then proved that even they don’t last forever. He became a popularizer of science, writing a bestselling book that introduced many to the science of time. And, of course, he did it all while fighting Lou Gehrig’s Disease, doing his most profound work as a public figure confined to an electric wheelchair and communicating with the world through a computer voice.

The Theory of Everything is based on a memoir by Hawking’s first wife, Jane Wilde, that attempts to look behind the myth and reveal the real man living behind the voice synth. It opens with a bike ride through Cambridge in 1963, where Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) is a promising, if somewhat scatterbrained, doctoral candidate in astrophysics and cosmology, which he defines as “a kind of religion for intelligent atheists.” When he’s not turning in impossibly elegant mathematical solutions written on the back of train schedules, he does what all of the other young scholars do: awkwardly chase girls. He meets Jane (Felicity Jones) at a house party and is immediately enchanted; but in a bit of foreshadowing of their eventual relationship, she has to give him her number, because she knows he would have asked if he had thought about it.

Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne

Just as Hawking is formulating his first big ideas that would earn him his doctorate, he is diagnosed with motor neuron disease and given two years to live. Jane insists they marry anyway, and she puts her own studies on hold to minister to him while he works on his world-changing science.

Directed by James Marsh, who won an Oscar for his 2009 documentary Man on Wire, The Theory of Everything resembles Walk the Line, in that it tries to illuminate the character of a “great man” through the lens of his great love. Hawking’s accomplishments are complex equations written on blackboard, and thus not as cinematic as Johnny Cash playing Folsom Prison. But like Walk the Line‘s Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, this movie soars on a pair of strong lead performances. Jones is self-possessed and compassionate as Jane, who bears the burden of caring for her husband and their three children until the cracks begin to show. Redmayne’s physically demanding performance as Hawking brings to mind Daniel Day-Lewis’ Oscar winning turn in My Left Foot. The film is at its best in the early going, as the lovers move through sun dappled English campuses with Hawking’s disease creeping up behind them, but it bogs down in the middle with some plodding characterization and the difficulties of explaining the complex science that is its subject’s life’s work. But The Theory of Everything ultimately wants to live in the heart and not the mind, and in that, it succeeds admirably.