Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan doesn’t quite spit it out and call a spade a spade, but the gist is that three high-profile Toronto Film Festival movies about trans or gay characters — The Danish Girl, About Ray and Freeheld — all disappointed or under-performed with the cognoscenti. One reason, he believes, is that these films seem to be more about their cisgender (i.e., straight) characters than the characters they’re ostensibly focused on. Hence Alicia Vikander is the Danish Girl standout, Michael Shannon allegedly gives the strongest and most humanistic performance in Freeheld (haven’t seen it), and Naomi Watts‘ Maggie character, the mother of Elle Fanning‘s transitioning girl/boy, is more “favored”, Buchanan claims, than anyone else in the film.
