After being thrown under the bus by Disney for the financial failure of her last film, writer/director Nia DaCosta smoothly silences the doubters with “Hedda,” a stunning declaration solidifying her voice, and easily the finest picture of her young career.
“The Marvels” was the lowest-grossing title in the history of the MCU, ranking dead last out of 37 pictures despite being the sequel to the billion-dollar “Captain Marvel.” It wasn’t any worse than every other MCU film post-“Avengers: Endgame,” and in fact possessed a great deal of charm relative to the films released on either side of it. But being helmed by a Black woman made it an easy diversity scapegoat for a brand in danger of sliding from postpeak struggles into full-on obsolescence.
For anyone who hadn’t seen her debut, “Little Woods,” or her “Candyman” remake, writing off DaCosta became commonplace in the discourse. But now, all that folderol feels like an ironic preamble to a film that marks her as one of the finest working filmmakers today.
Based on Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 play “Hedda Gabler,” DaCosta’s film moves the narrative from 19th century Norway to the UK in the 1950s, employing some shrewd gender and race bending to compound the complexity of the play’s social interplay. The changes and modernizations to the text create a fascinating playground for the performers, the audience, and DaCosta herself.
Hedda is a lively, complicated woman, possessing an occasionally self-destructive chaos.
Tessa Thompson stars as Hedda Tesman, neé Gabler, the recently married daughter of a famous general. Hedda is a lively, complicated woman, possessing an occasionally self-destructive chaos. Suffocating within the self-imposed exile of marriage, she must host and engineer a party at her opulent estate to ensure her husband, George (Tom Bateman), earns a professorship. Their new love has begun deep in debt, as George took loans out to purchase their home from Judge Roland Brack (Nicholas Pinnock), a man Hedda’s father tasked with looking out for her after his death.
But Hedda’s goal of charming the man who holds their fate in his hands becomes complicated when the lone rival for the job turns out to be her ex, Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss), a once wild and hedonistic author who has turned her life around thanks to sobriety and a new partner, the meek Thea Clifton (Imogen Poots).
Throughout the evening of socializing, dancing, drinking, and posturing, Hedda orchestrates a dangerous chain reaction of manipulation. Hedda herself possesses such a mean streak, much of it rooted in her own battles with maintaining agency and the regrets she has for not being a simpler, healthier human capable of a love she cannot ruin. But the delicious way Thompson plays her, we are constantly shifting back and forth between despising her for the havoc she wreaks and adoring her for how good she is at it.
From the film’s opening moments we know the party will end in someone’s death, but DaCosta frames and arranges the soap opera of it all so effectively that the viewer is too swept up in the melodrama to fret about the impending murder. DaCosta here is reunited with cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, Steve McQueen’s frequent collaborator, and together, the two make absolute magic. The film’s images make the most of the production design’s plush, posh environs, with gorgeous compositions and luxurious lighting schemes. DaCosta has never in her career thus far felt so alive and confident in her direction. The movie jumps off the screen in a way that feels intoxicating.
When Hoss as Lovborg is first introduced to Hedda at the party, DaCosta borrows from Spike Lee’s bag of tricks by putting Thompson on the camera dolly, and the way it is lit is sumptuous as to make the whole film halt. This reviewer, watching the film in bed on a MacBook, began to literally hoot and holler at the 13.3” LCD screen as if he were in the Sontag seat of an IMAX screening.
The visual joy of the film would be little more than pretty pictures without the assured and fascinating way DaCosta stages the drama with her updates and revisions to the text.
But the visual joy of the film would be little more than pretty pictures without the assured and fascinating way DaCosta stages the drama with her updates and revisions to the text. An Afro Latina Hedda, a Black Roland, and a female Lovborg would be perfectly welcome were the goal a race- and gender-blind production, one that just wanted to cast the best actors for each of the roles regardless of what was initially on the page. But DaCosta weaves the ensuing social implications into the play’s tightly coiled web of character relationships and power dynamics.
Roland plays a flirtatious game of cat and mouse with Hedda behind her husband’s back. But that relationship of de-facto uncle and niece reads differently when the only other Black person in Hedda’s sphere is actively exploiting that closeness in order to exact control over her body. Lovborg being a woman whose peers all know she’s queer gives Hoss so much more to play with than any male actor might have had with the original role. (She relishes it and steals the show out from under Thompson repeatedly.) The entire affair then feels so timely and enchanting in the way it wraps the sharpness of its commentary around the arousing wooziness of its soap opera.
It’s such a strong film that it’s a shame it didn’t have a longer and more robust theatrical release, one that might have attracted more awards season buzz and a fair share of statuettes for the cast and the creatives behind the camera. But there’s also something to be said for a film this good to be so broadly available to anyone already funding the Jeff Bezos-industrial complex’s initiative to ship laundry detergent and iPhone chargers instantaneously.
“Hedda” is streaming exclusively on Prime Video.