Even before Eddie Redmayne scooped a best actor Oscar for his studious, fully immersed inhabitation of Stephen Hawking in ?The Theory of Everything,? there had been talk of him taking the gold for ?The Danish Girl.? To what might be the eternal aggrievement of Michael Keaton fans, the talk wasn?t quite loud enough to give the Academy pause and decide to wait a year.
Through all this advance hype, rising Swedish star Alicia Vikander?s presence in the film has been treated as something as an afterthought ? even as she scored a popular breakthrough this spring in Alex Garland?s cult-attracting sci-fi pic ?Ex Machina.?
Yet the surprise of ?The Danish Girl? ? and it?s a film of few surprises, taking precisely the decorous, crowd-pleasing approach to tricky subject matter that one would expect from Hooper?s previous work ? is that it?s as much Vikander?s showcase as it is Redmayne?s.