Cinemazlowski 'The Danish Girl' and 'Carol' make for a static, morally confused movie going experience this weekend

Dec 4, 2015

In a year in which the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, and a TV landscape in which countless shows like "Modern Family" feature positive gay characters, it's not surprising that Hollywood is throwing open the doors to filmmakers depicting the issues of gay rights. After all, the mainstream media is eager to support such visions, and films like "Brokeback Mountain," "Milk" and "The Birdcage" have long shown that gay-friendly films can deliver on a big scale with crossover audiences as well.

 

And so it is that the nation's theaters are currently home to two high-profile homosexual-themed films at once: "Carol," in a story of a repressed lesbian love affair in the 1950s, and "The Danish Girl," which details the life of Danish painter Lili Elbe, who was the first person on the planet to undergo sex-reassignment surgery to become a transgender person in the 1920s.

 

Both films feature impressive casts and directorial pedigrees, with "Carol" starring two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett and Oscar nominee Rooney Mara as its secret lovers, and "The Danish Girl" featuring last year's Best Actor winner Eddie Redmayne as Elbe. "Carol" was directed by Todd Haynes, who has ridden gay-themed material to monetary and awards-season success with the 2002 film "Far From Heaven," while "Girl" is directed by Tom Hooper, who won an Oscar for helming "The King's Speech" in 2010.

 

These are obviously not a pair of movies that at the top of most Catholics' viewing lists, especially during Christmas season. But amid a slow week between the rush of Thanksgiving-weekend family films and the approaching onslaught of Oscar hopefuls to be released between Dec. 11 and Christmas, this is a slow weekend and I'm just trying to make our readers aware of what's going on in the culture.

 

"Carol" is a fictional tale, depicting the story of an upper-crust wife in 1950s New York City named Carol (Blanchett), who finds herself transfixed by a younger saleslady named Therese (Mara) at the perfume counter of a Macy's-style department store. Cate is trapped in a lifeless marriage to a man named Harge (Kyle Chandler), who is such a one-dimensional paragon of white-privileged patriarchal power that the audience only sees him pining for and demanding loyalty from Carol and doesn't even learn what he does for a living.

 

But that's par for the course with this film, since we also never learn what Therese really wants out of life or why she would abruptly abandon her own serious relationship with a much nicer guy named Richard (Jake Lacy). Carol herself is a cipher much of the time, with the only moments of intrigue coming from the revelation that she had previously engaged in a relationship with her lifelong friend Abby (Sarah Paulson), leaving Harge in despair as he sees her take up with Therese.

 

A custody battle over their daughter Rindi (names like Harge and Rindi should indicate the isolated bubble-world these characters live in) ensues, including dirty tricks like spying on the new lovers. This creates a couple of surprises and Haynes wrings more tension from the script by Phyllis Nagy towards the end, but the overall effect of "Carol" is strangely inert.

 

The same is sadly true of "The Danish Girl," in which Redmayne starts the film as the Danish male painter Einar Wegener before transforming into Lili. Einar is married to fellow painter Gerda (Alicia Vikander), and the two at first seem like any happy young couple as they get frisky multiple times in the first half hour while trying to have a child.

 

But despite Einar's seeming red-blooded passion for Gerda, the couple starts engaging in his desire to try on Gerda's stockings and shoes. This fetish quickly escalates into Gerda taking Einar to shop for women's clothes, fixing him up as a woman and even taking him out to a swank party while he pretends to be a female cousin named Lili.

 

Flush with new-found freedom to fully express himself, Einar starts to live as Lili more and more in their private time together. Things get more complicated as Gerda finds that her portraits of Lili are becoming a hot art commodity, and soon the couple have to face the ultimate question of how far should Einar go in his quest to live life as a woman.

 

On an artistic level aside from Christian moral considerations, "Carol" suffers from the fact that its setting in a time and moral era that has long since passed makes it seem like an instant museum piece. Meanwhile, "The Danish Girl" is a true story that is obviously timed to take advantage of the hoopla surrounding this year's transgender media figure Caitlyn Jenner, but it too is often emotionally stifled en route to its tragic conclusion.

 

But both movies wind up being counterintuitive to their own agendas. "Carol" features a woman who wreaks havoc on her marriage, coldly making her husband suffer both social embarrassment and emotional anguish, while also shutting out her past lover Abby as well as Therese when her whims dictate that it's necessary. Rather than being a sympathetic character, she comes off as a mostly calculating one.

 

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SPOILER ALERT: Meanwhile, "The Danish Girl" offers us a story in which there is nothing but tragedy on every level. Einar's transformation into Lili eventually destroys his marriage to Gerda, who becomes a supportive friend yet seems helplessly sad by the end, and the first step of the experimental surgery involved leaves him in physical agony that leads to an addiction to painkillers, while the second step goes so wrongly that he never recovers from nearly bleeding to death. END SPOILER

 

For the record, "Carol" has just a few words of foul language but it does feature a sex scene between the two women in which they are both toplessly nude and implied fully nude for about 30 seconds, plus another scene in which they start kissing and wake up nude under their sheets. "The Danish Girl" has a fully nude scene with the wife having sex with Einar before he starts transforming, and then features him standing naked before a mirror naked with his genitals tucked between his legs, in addition to showing him paying to attend a "peep show" in which a nude woman is running her hands all over her body, and he tries to replicate her actions in order to learn how to look sensual as a woman.

 

Between the destroyed relationships in both movies and the undeniable fact that Einar's surgical dream of turning into Lili killed him, it's hard to see what exactly the filmmakers of "The Danish Girl" and "Carol" are trying to accomplish. They certainly don't seem likely to appeal to moviegoers in a way that would make them want to follow in their characters' footsteps.