It wasn’t broke. Nia DaCosta fixed it anyway.
“Hedda Gabler,” Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 play about an independent, ruthless spirit caged to a one-sided marriage of convenience, is one of the towering monuments of the theater. You can’t go far in that medium without glimpsing the title character, looming over the plays and heroines that emerged in her wake. Any new adaptation would struggle to capture the lightning Ibsen bottled with his original work, and it might be hard to imagine such well-worn material making the same impact nearly 150 years later. At least, that’s what I would have thought.
“Hedda,” Nia DaCosta’s exhilarating new adaptation, is an anxiety-inducing nightmare, writ large. DaCosta, who also adapted the screenplay, makes inspiring changes to Ibsen’s play, bringing all the off-screen action into Hedda Gabler’s unaffordable home. A tale of marital isolation is now a Jay Gatsby bacchanal, a clash of classes and values, feminism and queerness waging a losing war against suffocating societal norms. It’s got sex and betrayal and guns, as though Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game” took a big ol’ whiff of coke right before the credits rolled.
Tessa Thompson stars as the title character, a Bohemian poster child who recently, to what seems like her own surprise, married a stuffy professor. Her options, of course, were limited. Even with the story dragged, with some kicking and screaming, into the 1950s she doesn’t have a lot of hope for her future. Marrying a safe man, George (Tom Bateman), who knows he married well above his league and will forgive her anything, gives her carte blanche to throw shameless parties and maintain her lavish lifestyle. At least at night, when she isn’t forced to endure her husband’s pathetic whining and milquetoast obsessions.
It’s the night of the big party, and Hedda is throwing away the flowers herself. She tears down any trace of the feminine, the matronly, in preparation for drama. Her husband is trying to get a new job at a university, the only way they can possibly keep their fancy house and pay their debts. But there’s competition for the gig, in the form of Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss), whose sexually progressive new book makes her a hotter prospect. She’s also Hedda’s ex-lover, and finally on the wagon, thanks to her new girlfriend Thea (Imogen Poots).
Hedda doesn’t have a plan, she’s in pursuit of a Xanatos Gambit, manipulating everyone at the gala in pursuit of the best possible outcome — but only for Hedda. If she brings someone along with her, bully for them, but that’s incidental. She’s a serpent who backed itself into a corner, and now she’s coiling and uncoiling, and sinking her fangs into everyone who stands between her and freedom, lust, money and victory. She’ll destroy any life as long as it’s not her own, and she’ll feel little, or nothing, about it.
Legendary actors like Ingrid Bergman, Maggie Smith, Peggy Ashcroft, Isabelle Huppert, Cate Blanchett, Claire Bloom and Annette Bening (to name very, very few) have put their stamp on Hedda Gabler. Thompson doesn’t compete with them. She doesn’t have to. Her version of Hedda is a vampire in disguise. She only comes alive at night, and she lurks in the shadows behind every potential victim. It would be easy to demonize her. Sometimes DaCosta does, because it’s a fair interpretation. But Thompson, adopting a steely patrician patois, is under constant attack. She’s devilishly pathetic, a dangerous anti-hero and a tragic anti-villain, all at once.
DaCosta has assembled a brilliant ensemble and conducts them like an experimental orchestra. Hoss stands out as the lover Ibsen, in his time, imagined as a man, but DaCosta’s rewrite spins gold razor-wire about of this film’s abundant queerness. Hedda and Eileen are united in their outsider status, but also divided. Eileen has a career. She’s fought tooth and nail to succeed in male-dominating academia. Hedda can’t fall back on her career. And as a Black woman, the doors Eileen barely managed to crack open will slam right in Hedda’s face. The times may be more progressive than in Ibsen’s original, but DaCosta has the freedom to say the quiet parts loud, and set them beautifully on fire.
“Hedda” takes your breath away. It’s a sensual, ingenious update of Ibsen’s classic play, honoring the grand theatrical tradition and transforming it into new, ecstatic cinema. Brilliantly photographed and edited, with an electrifying cast of characters, played by actors who understand the material and make it pulsate, throb and bleed. This is what the art of adaptation is all about.
