WITH A BANG: "Hedda"

It's not essential to bone up on Henrik Ibsen's drama “Hedda Gabler” before seeing “Hedda,” because the movie meets the crucial standard of adaptation: it's a formidable cinematic experience independent of its source.

- BY RICHARD BRODY

But to read the play, from 1890, in advance is to marvel at the combination of fidelity and freedom, of interpretation and imagination, that Nia DaCosta, the film's writer and director, brings to bear. Ibsen's title character is a spoiled, headstrong young woman who, newly and unhappily married to a dull scholar, enacts a Machiavellian scheme to advance his career and her social standing, with catastrophic results. DaCosta shifts the story to nineteen-fifties England, where Hedda (Tessa Thompson) and her husband, George Tesman (Tom Bateman), have just returned to their country estate after a six-month honeymoon and (unlike in the play) are hosting a lavish party to announce their arrival.

DaCosta both reveals and revises the story's tragic dimension up front, opening with Hedda being questioned by the police about events that led to a certain consequential gunshot.

Nearly the entire movie then unfolds in a flashback that dramatizes Hedda's account of the party. It begins the previous day, with a phone call from a long-absent friend, Eileen Lövborg (Nina Hoss), whom Hedda impulsively invites to the party. Eileen accepts, but her sarcasm hints at what their reunion later makes clear: the two women are ex-lovers. Eileen is also George's professional rival. He has been counting on a well-paying professorship, which he needs in order to afford his luxurious home. But Eileen, in the years since she and Hedda were together, has emerged as a far more original scholar. Now she is a candidate for the same academic position.