A close member of my family, deeply immersed in high school
drama, was intrigued by a classmate named Tessa Thomas. She was a pert young
thing with a lively spirit, and she gravitated naturally toward ingenue roles.
Hardly a shrinking violet, she had no trouble finding a date for the high
school prom. But she sometimes needed a ride home from late-night rehearsals,
and we were happy to oblige.
I didn’t think about Tessa for many years thereafter, until
her name started to appear in credits for major films. After appearing in a
stage production of For Colored Girls, she segued into the 2010 film
version, then scored a personal breakthrough in an award-winning college-set
comedy, Dear White People (2013). Two years later she made her first
appearance as the leading man’s love interest in Creed, then joined the
Marvel Universe as Valkyrie for Thor
Ragnarok and its sequels. Then
in 2021 she joined with a past Oscar nominee, Ruth Negga for Passing, a
complex indie about two old friends in 1920s Harlem, one of them acknowledging
her Black heritage and the other passing as white.
But though I saw Tessa’s face on the side of city buses, as
part of the publicity push for a 2019 Men in Black sequel, she seemed to
lack an above-the-title starring vehicle . . . until now. Hedda, written
and directed by her close friend Nia Da Costa, features Tessa as producer as
well as star, so this is definitely HER film. It’s also, of course, an
adaptation of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s controversial 1890
masterpiece, Hedda Gabler. I’ve read that Tessa herself, in thinking of
Ibsen classics, was most drawn to A Doll’s House, in which young wife
Nora—definitely an ingenue type—discovers in herself the resolve to overturn a
stifling marriage. But Da Costa wanted her to play instead a vixen who uses her
sexuality and her impetuous nature to bring down everyone who thwarts her desires.
Does Tessa make a good vixen? Yes, absolutely: she looks
gorgeous in a low-cut New Look gown (the play has been updated to England in
the 1950s), and mischief gleams in her eyes. And Da Costa, going far beyond
Ibsen’s one-set play, gives her a fabulous (though mortgaged to the hilt)
country estate in which to work her wiles. The film is set during one eventful
night at a no-holds-barred party, complete with jazz band, free-flowing booze,
fireworks on the lawn, and giddy skinny-dips into the lake on the property.
So Tessa is impressive, and the look of the film can’t be
bettered. Why, then, was I so restless on my living-room couch while watching
this Netflix extravaganza? For me the subordinate characters in this Hedda’s
world just don’t work. It’s well-known by now that Da Costa, in exploring
newlywed Hedda’s ongoing desire for someone other than her dull, dutiful
husband, has updated gender matters by shifting the brilliant, erratic Eilert
Lovborg from male to female (he becomes “Eileen”). This could have been an
interesting—and very modern—rethinking of the Ibsen original. But, in this key
role, Nina Hoss just seems out of place. Large, gawky, and oddly costumed (her
“evening wear” looks like a milkmaid’s dirndl), she does not seem like someone
who could ever ignite Hedda’s passions. I’m ready to believe in the possibility
of sexual desire between two women, but THESE two just don’t seem to fit
together in a convincing way. Moreover the film’s lengthy dialogue scenes
(particularly the ones between Lovborg and a more disciplined and wholesome sweetheart)
are dull indeed, missing Hedda’s spark. Too bad.
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