Eddie Redmayne's Face Bothers Me
In The Danish Girl, Tom Hooper's plodding Oscar-bait biography of painter Lili Elbe (Eddie Redmayne), the first transgender person to receive gender reassignment surgery, every shot is as lush and glowing as a painting. Slate-blue walls give way to the golden curls of Alicia Vikander's hair (in her Oscar winning role as Elbe's wife, Gerda); the glint of golds and velvet brocades and the way that red lipstick makes an actor look more vibrant and alive.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that The Danish Girl is a good film: until Eddie Redmayne takes the scene. Whether he's playing Lili as a man, Einar, or first discovering Einar's true identity, Redmayne plays every scene at a 10, pitching it to the mezzanine as a lost little girl, desperately trying to come out of this skinny man's body. He's demure. He's coy. He's tremulous. He's a strange creature of an actor, an awful match for Vikander's natural earthiness.
He is, in short, horrible.
Here's the thing; I have never cottoned to Eddie Redmayne in any movie I've seen him in. He's all flutters and manners, a voice that's thin and reedy, and when he's the central character -- as in Les Miserables or his Oscar-winning role in The Theory of Everything -- he's exudes an A-student's overpreparedness with the love-me! neediness of a drama kid.
He is possessed of something like beauty, I suppose, if you look at it a certain way. Lush lips, symmetrical eyes, and freckles and redheaded coloring that will keep him boyish until age 46. He can look attractive and he can look very weird, he can pout and look wrong and then stunningly beautiful. It is, in some way, the sort of beauty that could make movie stars — and yet, paired with his puckish demeanor, it's just all wrong. Alien beauty deserves alien attitude and Redmayne, bless his heart, is a people pleaser to the hilt.
Look, Eddie Redmayne is British. He is posh. He went to Eton. He has the correct actor training, a Tony for appearing in a Mark Rothko play on Broadway, and what looks to be an interesting film career. But he has been cast all wrong, and his actorly neediness makes me recoil every time I see it. When Redmayne was in the thick of Oscar talk for The Theory of Everything, one of his rivals was fellow weird Brit Benedict Cumberbatch, also playing a genius in The Imitation Game. In some ways, they were the same genre of actor playing the same beautifully tragic role, so, naturally, in real life they were locked in a match of who can be more charming, at the right time, for maximum publicity.
To wit: November 2014, Cumberbatch announces his engagement with his longtime partner, theater director Sophie Hunter. In December 2014, Redmayne responds to that by marrying his longtime girlfriend, Hannah Bagshawe. Shots fired. Cumberbatch has no other alternative than to marry Hunter, and he does so in February 2015, the day after Valentine's Day and the week that Oscar voting closed. It was as close as two Eton-educated Shakespearean-trained British actors could come to a motherfuckin' walkoff. But it was too late for Cumberbatch, as Redmayne charm offensived his way through the grueling Oscar campaign, playing it correctly so that he had won.
Redmayne literally jumped out of his skin as he accepted the Oscar. He was all jangles and nerves as Cumberbatch clapped in a white tux, trying hard to smize with his eyes. But even though Redmayne has an Oscar under his belt, every time I see him on screen he's still trying really, really hard to get me to like him. It's as if he's gone full throttle into boyishness and ignored what he really has to offer - which is creepy, fey, Britishness. Because the thing is, the actual secret is that the true Eddie Redmayne is camp. He is the British villain of your dreams. Almost attractive at the right angle. From a higher class than you. Rewarded for a talent that isn't ever transcendent. He is like an alien creature put on earth to deliver withering putdowns, and the only filmmakers who have truly understood his weirdness, so far, were the Wachoskis in their complete mess Jupiter Ascending. Is Redmayne great in Jupiter Ascending? I'm not sure, but he has nailed a sort of androgynous Prince thing, he uses his accent well, and he yells and preens like the spoiled boy your eyes want to see him as, that the audience expects.
There's a pleasure to Redmayne's performance because it is palpably confident, and that confidence is in short supply in his other films. Why can't he just be vaguely evil and British, playing variations on Daniel Day-Lewis' Cecil in A Room With a View? After all, a Daniel Day-Lewis is a once-in-a-generation talent, and, well, he's not dead. Sadly, unlike Day-Lewis, Redmayne may just be a movie star, the ultimate evil British bad guy, skinny and soft-spoken and consumed with revenge, cursed with thinking that he's an chameleonic actor. But until he figures that out, he's going to act for you, he's going to act so very hard, and you will like him (really); and he will remain uniquely grating on film, insisting on changing, taking on sizes and personas and characters, embodying every possible hero with a million mannerisms before you can decide whether or not you like the character.
This essay is an exercise in futility, of course; Redmayne's next film, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, is a Harry Potter prequel. He will ascend, Oscar in hand, to the next level of movie stardom that we have these days: anchoring a blockbuster of existing IP that could possibly go on for ten years, at the least. He will be inescapable. His face will be plastered on books at the airport. But there is one small bright side: at the least, he will have to play the same character, over and over. Perhaps, at some point, he will calm down and do it with style.