If a computer were programmed to create the perfect Oscar movie in 2015, it would probably look something like The Danish Girl, director Tom Hooper's stately, overwhelmingly stylish period melodrama about Danish artist Lili Elbe, the first known transgender woman to undergo sexual-reassignment surgery, and her devoted wife, painter Gerda Wegener. Every required part of an awards movie is there: stellar cast (Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander), lush cinematography, plaintive score, a stirring social message. But despite, or perhaps because of, all that perfect, well-appointed polish, there is something rather lifeless at the heart of this well-meaning film. It concerns a topic with true relevance to today, but that urgency is too often drowned out by Hooper's heaps of aesthetic indicating, and by Redmayne's fastidious, oddly self-conscious performance.

Redmayne is a technician, a young expert in the field of meticulously detailed performances. That’s why he shined last year as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything—it was a boggling bit of becoming, a disappearing act. But there was also something deeply alive in Redmayne’s Hawking, a crucial spirit that kept the performance from becoming merely a hyper-articulated impersonation. In The Danish Girl, though, Redmayne is so mannered, and so bathed in Hooper's glow of righteousness, that Lili is rendered almost inhuman. She was a brave transgender pioneer, and thus merits our attention and admiration, but The Danish Girl is so concerned with doing her justice, and with winning our respectful approval, that it doesn't tell us much about who Lili, née Einar Wegener, really was. By the film's turgid end, Redmayne has lost all sense of the character, dissolving into a puddle of tears and pained, beatific expressions. It's a capital-P Performance, one that's likely to get the Academy's attention, but it often borders on shallow.

That shallowness is not all Redmayne’s fault, though. It’s also owed to the film’s too-cautious approach to its sensitive subject matter. In the late 1920s, when the film takes place, there was certainly little language about, and virtually no cultural understanding of, transgenderism, so it’s entirely appropriate that, in the world of film, there’s a good deal of confusion surrounding Einar’s transition into Lili. But that doesn’t let the film itself off the hook, made as it was in modern times. Hooper is enamored, as are we, of how striking Redmayne, all fine-boned and beautifully androgynous, looks in Lili’s clothes and makeup. But Hooper too often lets all that material stuff act as stand-in for Lili's psychology, her internal ache and yearning. We never really understand the source of Lili’s bravery, just that she looks wet-eyed and fragile as she strives with courage to realize her true self. The film keeps a nervous, respectable distance from its subject, overly careful to not offend, and in so doing offers only a polite but aloof beneficence for this often marginalized community, rather than doing the more thorough, and messier, work of getting up close and personal.

That said, this is a well-intentioned film, and one with enough potential mainstream appeal (for the artsy/awards-y crowd, anyway) to probably do some good. After a screening in Toronto, back in September, I overheard a group of people in maybe their 40s and 50s saying that the film helped them gain an understanding, or the beginnings of an understanding, of what the transgender coming-out and transition process is like. So if the film has that power, then it's certainly a worthwhile piece. But something about the film left me cold, slightly chilled by how self-congratulatory the whole thing becomes by the end. (It doesn’t help matters that Lili and Gerda’s romantic history has been heavily revised to wring a more tidily sentimental ending out of the story.) As the music swells and the end credits begin to roll, the film clamors to be rewarded for its noble empathy, which is rarely, if ever, a good look for a movie.

Still, it's not a film without merits. Hooper’s idiosyncratic framing aside, the film looks great. And Vikander, coming down the home stretch of her miraculous multi-movie year, is a strong, slightly subtler counterbalance to Redmayne's busyness—she radiates decency in what is, to my mind, the film’s true lead role. There’s enough goodness in The Danish Girl that I suspect it can and will affect hearts and minds, so perhaps I should be less cynical in inferring its cynicism. I just wish that everyone’s glossy prestige impulses had been reined in some, so that we could leave the film with a true understanding of Lili, not simply a vague pity for her elegant museum exhibit of a plight.