A Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) update of Ibsen
Quoting the ancient Greek comic dramatist Antiphanes in the prologue of Hedda, a new update of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, does not prove writer-director Nia DaCosta’s sophistication; it announces her inanity.
The Antiphanes quote (“I trust only one thing in a woman, that she will not come to life again after she is dead”) is meant to justify DaCosta’s retaliatory misreading of Ibsen and, by extension, her condemnation of Western culture’s misogyny altogether. DaCosta twists Ibsen’s pioneering 1891 examination of female psychology into brash, modern queer feminism. Here, Hedda (played by Tessa Thompson) is a black bisexual social climber in 1950s England who plots revenge against Britain’s class structure and academic system. She compromises her professor husband, George Tesman (Tom Bateman), and plots revenge against her former lover, competitive scholar Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss).
DaCosta, last known for her insipid 2021 remake of the horror film Candyman, rewrites Ibsen’s character study as a crime mystery: Hedda is interrogated by police about a shooting that took place during a faculty party at her estate, shown in extenuated flashbacks.
While Ibsen made Hedda fascinating for what today is called her “agency,” DaCosta stresses her sexual manipulation of both an envious husband and Eileen, the erstwhile female paramour who boasts about collaborating on a career-enhancing thesis with a younger academic, Thea (Imogen Poots). Intrigue is stirred by these male and female rivalries. The debauchery includes various humiliations on the dance floor, dunkings at a pond, cocaine-snorting, fornication in an outdoor maze, and sapphic drinking contests scored to post-WWII novelty tunes “Crazy He Calls Me” and “It’s Oh So Quiet.” This is DaCosta’s period version of a Diddy party (featuring standard oddball Kathryn Hunter as a mannish cynic), meant to give historical validity to gender-crossing freak-offs.
Independent-minded Hedda inherited a gun fetish from her military father (where Ibsen made it the source of her comeuppance). But here, Hedda becomes vulnerable when Eileen appears, an irresistible symbol of female sexuality dressed in a black bodice that makes her pendulous cleavage as intimidating as her intellectual prowess.
The story’s balance tips toward Eileen, who articulates her ambition in a centerpiece speech to a “gang of perverts” — weak-chinned, weak-willed male colleagues who fear her just-written tome (“about sex in the classical era”) that defies Ibsen and suggests a bizarre cross between Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae and Krafft-Ebbing. Eileen voices DaCosta’s thesis: “Maybe all people have a thing that they like, that is new, maybe. And as some past hidden things have become normalized, I wonder why shouldn’t hidden things in the now become normal in the future.”
DaCosta’s conceit that a black (“duskier”) Hedda can best embody “hidden things in the now” is wrecked by Thompson’s devious, flirtatious Hedda. As a Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) figure, she resembles a hefty Eartha Kitt. But since she’s a less forceful actress than Hoss, she’s merely flighty, whereas Janet Suzman and Glenda Jackson in memorable Seventies TV and film productions conveyed Hedda’s eroticism verbally and through subtle manners, on the same level as Bette Davis in The Letter.
This Millennial Hedda argues for lesbian rights, recalling Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. European actress Hoss attains moments of palpable distress but Americans Thompson and DaCosta never pull inspiration from women in history (say, Ida B. Wells or Mary McLeod Bethune). Their activist petulance turns the fabulous sympathetic monster Ibsen created into a simpering victim. DaCosta’s inept staging and vulgar language lacks the force that Ibsen achieved through simple heterosexual tension. Hedda’s coven of closeted lesbians is like a conspiracy of closeted communists. Their behavior falsifies mid-century propriety to flatter progressive Hollywood’s self-righteous delusion of its superior morality. DaCosta’s adaptation is insultingly blatant regarding sexual oppression (sneaking in an unwarranted reference to Virginia Woolf’s suicide). But the fact that the filmmakers could bowdlerize Ibsen this way suggests that lesbians are no longer oppressed. Hedda is not about human nature or passion but the politricks of social justice.
