Movie review
In Nia DaCosta’s elegantly searing drama “Hedda,” Tessa Thompson makes a classic role entirely her own. As in Henrik Ibsen’s play “Hedda Gabler,” this Hedda is an unhappy, complicated woman who has entered into a marriage with a man she doesn’t love, in order to give her the social status she wants. In the opening scenes, she strides through her magnificent English country home, red dress flowing behind her, like a lion surveying its pride. She speaks with a pinpoint precision (note the small symphony she makes of the name “Tabitha,” like she’s biting it) and a British accent that sounds like pouring cream; she looks theatrical and bored when an old flame kisses her; she toys with a gun and plays with her silky elbow-length gloves. And those gloves, as the metaphor goes, truly do come off. Does the gun go off? Wait and see.
DaCosta (“Candyman,” “The Marvels”) keeps the spirit of Ibsen’s play while making some significant changes: moving the setting to 1950s England, changing the gender of Hedda’s former lover Eilert Lovborg (here called Eileen and played by Nina Hoss) and introducing the element of race. (It goes mostly unspoken in the screenplay that Hedda is Black, while her husband and most of their circle are white, but it’s unmistakably part of the drama.) The action takes place almost entirely over 24 hours, in which Hedda and her nervous-looking husband George (Tom Bateman) throw a lavish party that grows increasingly bacchanalian as the hour grows later, and in which Hedda must confront her complex feelings toward Eileen and Eileen’s lover Thea (Imogen Poots), who Hedda once bullied in school. The party rages on; a beautiful chandelier falls to its death; a beautiful woman plays dominoes with people’s hearts, not seeming to know her own endgame.
“Hedda” is gorgeous eye candy; that house, with its peacock wallpaper and perfect amber light, is a dream, and Thompson in Hedda’s perfectly fitted green party dress (she wears it through most of the film, like armor) looks like its loveliest work of art. But there’s more going on here than pretty pictures: This fascinating portrait of a lady has ice and steel at its core. “Don’t you miss me?” Hedda croons at one point to Eileen. Her reply is swift and glacial. “Like an appendix.”
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