Nia DaCosta’s “Hedda” Shoots Straight

Wresting “Hedda Gabler” from its theatrical confines, DaCosta effects a major structural transformation with graceful ingenuity: the party, which constitutes the entire field of action, is her invention. In Ibsen’s play, set solely in two contiguous rooms in the Tesmans’ villa, George comes home after a highly eventful night of escapades that are left unseen and merely described to Hedda. DaCosta turns Ibsen’s text inside out, making the Tesmans’ home the site of those festivities. In so doing, she avoids the overused adaptation ploy of adding distant locations to those of a stage play, instead expanding the action but only as far as the Tesman estate allows—thus stretching but preserving the unity of space. The film ranges freely through the mansion’s many rooms and makes dramatic use of the lavish grounds, including a hedge maze (with cozy trysting nooks), a vast lawn (where Hedda shoots with abandon), a lake (where revellers swim in various states of dress and undress), and a formal garden (where Eileen leaves her manuscript).

In DaCosta’s hands, Ibsen’s emotionally extreme but tonally restrained play becomes a spectacular, flamboyant melodrama, with physical action as intense as the characters’ inner worlds. Far from cheapening or diluting Ibsen’s themes and conflicts, the action revitalizes them. “Hedda” is a frenzied, exuberant film, with turbulent confrontations rendered in lacerating dialogue. The louche festivities provoke dangerous gamesmanship, and scenes with a jazz band and a lively singer (Sophie Oliver) capture the evening’s reckless spirit, as Hedda coaxes couples onto the dance floor and then struts and sashays among and between them.

There’s another, altogether more substantial element of the story which Ibsen treats mainly as an offstage plot point but which DaCosta foregrounds and deepens: the intellectual content of the manuscript that is the object of contention. In the play, Ejlert Løvborg (the equivalent of the film’s Eileen) refers to his opus only briefly, as pertaining to “the future course of civilization.” Eileen’s field of study, however, is sexuality, and her manuscript is about the future of sex, a topic that she musters the courage to discuss, in a sort of spontaneous seminar, with Greenwood, George, and a gaggle of other men. They are taken aback by her audacity and goad her into detailing the book’s genesis. The scene is one of the movie’s most thrilling and perilous: Eileen, drunk and dishevelled, gives an uninhibited account of a night of near-debauchery, including a candid description of a fetish and a brilliantly speculative philosophical extrapolation from this raw experience.

Hoss’s fearless ferocity in the role of Eileen, the assertiveness with which she lends physical strength to the character’s intellect, renders the scholar’s vulnerability to Hedda’s cruel schemes all the more tragic. The heart of the film is Hedda’s contradictory passions—for money, for status, and, especially, for and against Eileen. The protagonist’s diabolical plot is fuelled by an unmanageable tangle of emotions, including raging jealousy, mercenary self-interest, and resentment of Eileen’s professional and intellectual accomplishments, which sparks shame at her own cosseted frivolity.

With this radically dissonant outpouring of feeling, “Hedda” is, above all, Thompson’s showcase, and she rises to its challenges with ravenous energy and flickering nuance, in an imposing, screen-filling performance. While checking the credits, I wondered how many Oscar nominations Thompson has received and was shocked to find that the answer is zero. She’s given some of the most riveting performances in recent years, in “Creed,” “Passing,” “Sylvie’s Love,” and “Sorry to Bother You”; by temperament, she’s a melodramatic performer, a modern-day counterpart to Barbara Stanwyck (four nominations, zero wins). In “Hedda,” Thompson combines refined and creative diction, taut reserve, and radiant power. With precision, concentration, and sincerity, she delivers maximal emotion with apparently minimal exertion. In keeping with the essence of melodrama, she displays heightened naturalism and everyday grandeur. It will be quite a year for movie acting if her performance has many equals.

Thompson’s compressed fury provides a fiery core for DaCosta’s cinematic vision. The director wrenches apart Ibsen’s terse and precise mechanism and makes room for a proliferation of arresting moments—caught on the wing in wide-screen images, thanks to Sean Bobbitt’s cinematography—that balance tragedy and horror with excitement and wonder. The story may debunk the stock character of the femme fatale, but DaCosta also celebrates, however ruefully, such forceful women’s glorious theatrical sensibility, diplomatic wiles, and erotic energy, a volatile mixture of qualities that men, out of vanity and fear, repress until it explodes with wasteful and ruinous force. DaCosta’s extravagant spectacle of life in the many rooms and on the many acres of the Tesmans’ heavily mortgaged estate doesn’t hide this world’s ruthlessness, its violence, or even its gore. But it also exposes the sensual pleasures of the mind, the sublimity of a woman’s ability to extract ideas of historic power and visionary import from the selfsame frivolities of the social whirl. That, too, DaCosta restores, however symbolically, to its rightful place. ♦