In Hedda’s Take on Ibsen, Style Gets in the Way of Substance

Certain plays, love ’em or hate ’em, are useful in the same way standards make a great playground for singers and jazz musicians. A play that everyone knows—or at least knows something about—can be a framework, a jumping-off point for all kinds of imaginative interpretations. The late-19th century Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen has given us two works in particular that actors and directors love to revisit: both A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler are stories of unruly women, characters who take decisive action without courting masculine approval. Nora, of A Doll’s House, is a wife and mother who walks out on her family, society be damned. The title character of Hedda Gabler is a bored, unhappily married aristocrat who toys with the fates of those around her as a way of seizing some control over her own life. These are women who have just had it. There’s no sell-by date on their anger, and so they resurface in the culture time and again. There’s a lot of fury in Hedda, Nia DaCosta’s visually inventive, if somewhat disjointed, reimagining of Hedda Gabler—though it’s the kind of fury intended to invigorate rather than alienate. Tessa Thompson stars as the willful heroine, married to a rather meek academic, George Tesman (Tom Bateman), who’s angling for an important university position. His chief rival is a woman who has already published one brilliant treatise and just completed another, Eileen Lovborg (played by the terrific German actress Nina Hoss); she also happens to be one of Hedda’s ex-lovers. The setting is Hedda and Tesman’s glorious English country house, sometime in the 1950s. The duo is throwing a party—Eileen will be there, along with her current paramour, also a collaborator in her work, Thea Clifton (Imogen Poots)—though tragedy will strike by the night’s end. Meanwhile, a manipulative judge, Roland Brack (Nicholas Pinnock), lurks around the fringes, hoping to seduce or even blackmail the electrically attractive Hedda. At the beginning of the film, as party preparations are under way, she stands imperiously on the roof of her grand estate in a clingy red jersey dress and shoots at him with a pistol. No wonder he can’t get enough of her. If you’re not already familiar with the play, you may find yourself a little lost in Hedda—or perhaps just bored. DaCosta has made a hit horror film (Candyman) and a mainstream superhero movie (The Marvels), and with Hedda, you get the sense that she and Thompson are having a blast as they break free of the constraints that come with making a studio blockbuster. Thompson’s Hedda and Hoss’ Eileen circle one another like hungry panthers—you can still sense the erotic crackle between them. But elsewhere, you’re not quite sure why Hedda is so intent on stirring the pot. That’s part of the point, of course—Hedda isn’t supposed to be easy to parse. But Thompson’s performance is so mannered that it’s hard to surf Hedda’s brainwaves. Her diction is aggressively fluted and mannered, so deliberately stylized that it feels like needless embellishment. Thompson is a terrific actress; she was astonishing Rebecca Hall’s 2021 adaptation of Nella Larson’s Passing, as woman drawn into the fragile web of an old high school friend who has tried to erase her racial identity. But aggressive stylization still needs to serve the essence of the character; it can’t just read as a premeditated, fussed-over choice. It doesn’t help that certain elements of Hedda are deliberately overstated: no actress could survive the garish makeup Hoss wears, or her weird half-siren, half-milkmaid gown, which ends up serving a purpose in the plot—one that feels far too calculated. In interviews, DaCosta has talked about the pleasures of telling stories in which Black women behave badly, instead of being forced to serve as virtuous role models. That’s exactly the kind of director you want for an Ibsen adaptation, someone who can bring a gust of originality to material that’s been mined countless times. But intentions don’t always translate into a cohesive, fully lived-in film. The movie’s production design is gorgeous: it has a luxe, lavish look. Hedda’s grand house, with its flocked wallpaper and ornate mirrors, feels both seductive and oppressive to us—it’s easy to see how it feels to her. But Hedda seems more focused on its own novelty than on the emotional bones of the story. The character of Hedda Gabler is elusive by design. The last thing she needs is lots of fancy footwork around her; we need to be allowed to register her ruthlessness and her majesty on our own.