Hedda

dir: Nia DaCosta

2025

Hedda Gabler… Is Hedda Gabler, the character as opposed to the play (or this movie, based on the play), one of the most toxic and destructive characters in all of, I dunno, cinema and theatre?

She’s not in it for kittens and rainbows. She’s kinda like the Joker and Margo from All About Eve and Lady Macbeth and Iago and a tornado of libidinous destruction, which I guess is great. If you’re of a certain age, you had to do Hedda Gabler at school in Eng Lit (if you’re from a nation that had English Literature on its school curriculum of course; I can’t imagine it being high on the syllabus in China). As such it’s probably one of those stories you remember, but not well, and don’t like, because you were ‘forced’ to read it.

This here is not an entirely contemporary retelling, but it does set it in England in the 1920s, rather than the Norway from whence it came, and it significantly changes aspects of the story, making it unpredictable even for someone who remembers the text well, or has seen it as a play recently.

I remember about… twenty years ago Cate Blanchett played Hedda in a staging of the play that (we were told) was really important in Sydney. I never saw it, but I did watch a documentary on it called In the Company of Actors, which I very much enjoyed, because it meant a) I didn’t have to travel to Sydney b) I didn’t have to watch a play and c) I didn’t have to make awkward small talk with some society matron from the North Shore over sherries during the interval.

Blanchett is, obviously, a great actor, and this being one of the ‘big’ roles let her cut loose and overact to her heart’s content. I found it equal parts fascinating and extremely pretentious, which is how it should be.

She would have, had this script been floating about 20 years ago, probably been all over this, because it’s significantly different from the traditional play. She would have relished it, eaten the role up and left no crumbs.

Instead, Tessa Thompson tackles this intimidating role.

I have seen Tessa Thompson be great in other things. She’s been great in flicks like Passing, or Sorry to Bother You, or the Creed flicks.

She is somewhat less than great here, I have to say. She looks great, she embodies the part, but that accent, ye gods, it’s so distracting and offputting! It feels horrible to say that. And I know she can do vaguely British accents – she does one in the Marvel flicks where she plays Valkyrie.

The strangest part about the accent is that it doesn’t match how these other people, that the character has known from childhood, speak at all. If you grow up with people, generally, sorry or happy to say, you sound like them.

They speak functional Brit accents, like you’d hear down the post office or from a librarian. She talks like she’s got both toffee and marbles in her mouth, with an amount of over-enunciation that would make Eartha Kitt in the 1960s Batman tv series playing Catwoman blush.

I shouldn’t fixate on it so much. She does some other admirable character work, I guess. This character… this character is a lot. She is calculating, cruel, composed and capricious, and she’s also a mess, self-destructive, maybe self-hating yet immensely proud, as she should be. A layer this flick adds is that, by gender-swapping the key role of Eilort Lövborg to Eileen, and having the great Nina Hoss play the role, it adds the additional complexity of main characters being perhaps gay or bi, but in an era where women couldn’t be open about their actual affections without risking being ostracised.

The majority of the story transpires over the course of a night and the next day, at a party thrown by Hedda. It’s the 1920s, so of course the band plays a version of “It’s Oh So Quiet”, made famous by Björk but dating from an earlier time, sung by Betty Hutton from the 1950s, and yet it’s from earlier, being a German song from the 40s.

But we don’t talk about German songs from the 40s, huh.

Using the setting of the 1920s is really just for the look, for the set design, the aesthetics, maybe the costuming, but the script doesn’t entirely engage with the time period effectively. And, since Tessa Thompson is also African-American, you’d think it maybe engages on issues of race or colourism, but mostly that stuff is set aside, except for two instances.

A random female party guest mutters under her breath, upon seeing the lady of the house for the first time, that she is “duskier” than she thought she would be. And there’s another time where Hedda yells, in a story where there ahistorically and anachronistically haven’t seemed to be that many impediments to achieving or maintaining her social standing, that she is both a woman and Black, and therefore behind multiple eight balls, so to speak, in terms of being taken seriously in a man’s world.

She is married, to an ineffectual man and a somewhat successful academic, George Tesman (Tom Bateman) and yet always, always, everyone refers to her by her maiden name, which only makes him feel more ineffectual. He at least manages the accent well, which helps since he’s British.

He is desperate for a professorship at the local university, which their continued occupation of the stately manor in which they’re throwing the party is also dependent on, and the biggest threat to him getting the job is Eileen (Nina Hoss), Hedda’s ex, who is a force of nature herself, who is a respected academic and she has a new manuscript, which could tip the scales in her favour in terms of getting the uni job.

If Hedda actually liked her husband, what she visits upon Eileen, who used to be an alcoholic mess, but is now sober, with a younger partner (sort of) who dotes on her and keeps her on the straight and narrow (Imogen Poots), would seem to be the actions of a cruel but determined operator who’s looking out for her husband’s interests as well as her own.

But no-one who watches this would think there’s any genuine motivation beyond wanting to ruin an ex because they’ve happily moved on.

It feels weird wanting to write about this story that debuted in 1890, and has had ample time to be spoiled by and for anyone, with an ending that’s as famous as its story, but I guess I don’t want to completely warp people’s potential enjoyment by laying it out completely. Let’s just say that while they do keep Hedda as a fairly reckless and self-destructive character, the ending doesn’t proceed entirely (at all) for her or for the Eileen character that one would expect knowing the story.

The reasons for that aren’t entirely clear. I mean, there’s no way there’s going to be a Hedda II, surely? This isn’t going to become a franchise, where Hedda travels from city to city destroying academics because it amuses her. Now that I’ve typed that out I think, damn, now that’s a series I could watch.

There are entirely too many series available now on streaming services, so, no, please no-one get any ideas. It’s hard enough to keep up as it is.

I would say that it’s uncomfortable viewing, a lot of the time, because at a different time and in a different age we would be watching this character and stressing along with her; Hedda set the template for many exhausting neurasthenic characters and performances that we are familiar with, from the Blanche Duboises to the Gena Rowlands in flicks like A Woman Under the Influence, to the kinds of performances Elizabeth Moss gives in the movies she’s made with Alex Perry Ross.

You know, the kinds of flicks you regret watching because just thinking about them kickstarts your anxiety. I can generally but not always appreciate these kinds of performances, but you do pay a price.

She is, and this flick is, a lot of the time, fucking exhausting. It helps that some of the other performances are so strong.

Nina Hoss is phenomenal in her role as Eileen. She is the only one that Hedda can’t entirely manipulate, flatter, bully or coerce, for most of the movie’s length. Until, of course, she cracks. But even then the downward spiral isn’t completely off a cliff: she has enough self-awareness to know her own failings and insight enough to see the emptiness and cowardice within Hedda, the yawning void that needs to destroy all happiness in order for Hedda to feel something. And the source of her pride is that she’s actually done something in life, actually worked hard and used her intellect to conduct research, analyse the results and then actually write something.

Of course her greatest achievement is getting over Hedda and not wanting to deal with her bullshit anymore, and that’s definitely what Hedda cannot tolerate the most.

It is, at turns, melodramatic in painful ways, in some clever ways, and comedic in that the underpinning structure that surrounds all of this story is the clear knowledge that these are women in a man’s world in which no matter Eileen’s intellect or how great Hedda is at getting her way, they all are still completely dependent on the good opinion and favour of men. Judge Brack (Nicholas Pinnock), a character unchanged from the original, lurks everywhere throughout the manor, never missing an opportunity to maul Hedda whenever he gets a chance. Their continued moneyed existence is dependent upon him at that manor, since he gave them the money to get it, but his entitlement to Hedda’s body is something that he is convinced of that dates back much longer, it seems. He is an absolute prick of a human being, and in no way the equal but opposite that a character like Hedda would require. He’s just a guy, with different elements of power, who wants what he wants no matter consent or love or even mild affection, who eventually resorts to brute force, because this is the patriarchy unvarnished, and because even this artificial world is built to serve the needs of men at the expense of everyone else, especially women.

Yeah, it’s not like I’m saying this is a feminist masterpiece, or anything close to it. It’s so inconsistent in its realisation, in its tempo, in its dramatics and how it resolves that I really wonder why, why they bothered, why the changes. I mean, the best thing about the changes is that Nina Hoss gets to make that character her own, but then, she could have played Hedda instead, and I dare say would have made a better go of it.

This flick isn’t without merit, I just think it really represents more a string of missed opportunities.

6 times maybe they could have asked Cate Blanchett to play the judge instead out of 10

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“I want for once in my life power to mould a human destiny” – yeah but into what horrible shape? – Hedda

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2183186457/