June 12-13 at the Egyptian
(Part of SIFF)
For years, Hedda Gabler has languished at the fringes of our cultural consciousness. Henrik Ibsen, Hedda's 100-year-dead Norwegian author, is considered a dated part of our legacy, canonical but dull, without the enduring fascination of a Shakespeare or Moliére. Hell, even Chekhov gets more attention from young whippersnappers who want to engage the old masters. But no more.
Paul Willis, formerly of Seattle's celebrated Printer's Devil Theatre, has turned his modern stage adaptation of the dark classic into a somewhat-experimental movie that will premiere at SIFF. He has siphoned off Hedda's embalming fluids and reinjected the hot blood that once made her so harrowing and worthy of the canon to begin with. And he stuck her in Wenatchee.
"I'd read the play in college, and I thought it was boring," said Willis. "I could see its historical value, but it didn't seem to be relevant at all. But at 27, I picked it up again and it seemed more immediate than most of the new plays I was reading. It seemed more plausible, these characters in this achy spot between being young adults and not-young adults, trying to come to terms with the fact that their lives won't turn out the way they wanted them to be. There's this desperate grip on the vision of how our lives will be, and a big disconnect between the lies you tell yourself and what's actually going on in your life."
The story opens as Hedda and George, her naive new husband, move into a house he can't afford but bought anyway, on the expectation of a university appointment and out of blind devotion to his fidgety and snooty wife. The new couple soon learns that George's old academic rival, a wretched alcoholic, has sobered up and returned to compete with George for his university post. That's when things turn sour and the characters are drawn down a road that leads them all to a very ugly place.
Willis tweaked Ibsen's original into a stage version to enthusiastic response. He was happy with the actors and proud of his production, but felt like he didn't get at the fear of failure that originally sparked his imagination. He began to raise funding for a movie version through private sources, and the Northwest Film Forum kicked in a Start-to-Finish grant, helping scare up cash through nonprofit networks.
The Norwegian government and Skien, Ibsen's hometown, also pitched in. "Norway considers Ibsen one of its biggest exports, and they've got an Ibsen centennial coming up in 2006," Willis said. "It's funny, but they aren't really purists over there. It's just, 'Bend it, twist it, break it.'"
Translating the play into a movie gave him the chance to tweak Ibsen's structure and characters further. "There's an authorship to filmmaking that's different from directing," Willis said. "I could smuggle in more things that were mine along with the parts of Ibsen I was really inspired by. Purists probably won't like this film and heavy-duty academic deconstructionists won't like it either--they'll think I haven't gone far enough."
Hedda Gabler, in fact, has been one of the battlegrounds in the war between canonical literary purists and trendy cultural criticism. The old guard properly reads her as a manipulative, destructive monster while some on the fashionable left try to steal away her terrible, fascinating power and make her a victim, tragically trying to exercise feminist autonomy.
Critic and curmudgeon Harold Bloom perceptively recognizes that Hedda was part of Ibsen's Norwegian fixation with trolls and the trollish in human nature. Bloom says the playwright's trolls aren't evil in a Nazi or Mephistophelean sense, but are more like "sadistic, disturbed children.... Most simply, trolls are before good and evil, rather than beyond it."
As portrayed by the stellar Heidi Schreck (reprising her sharp and intense performance from the stage version), Willis' Hedda is neither victim nor troll, but a little bit of both, with a good helping of modern angst thrown in. In the monologue that opens the movie, she says, "I have finally understood the horror of it. Mine is a creative nature. That is, I have everything a creative person should have.... One thing is lacking: talent." She is as frightening as ever, and maybe even more so because we recognize her as a peer--she is that frustrated, creative genius we all secretly nourish, who imagines a "beautiful life," lived without compromise. "Hedda is somebody who is always trying to inspire greatness in others, but she can't," said Willis. "She makes a mockery of everything. She's a mess."
Stylistically, Willis' Hedda is an impressionistic scrapbook, pasting together dialogue, grainy visuals, soundscapes, jiggly camera shots, and weird shifts in speed. "Paul is one of the few artists I've met who is genuinely interested in using digital video for its visual strengths and weaknesses, not just as an economical way to make something that could be shot on film," said Michael Seiwerath, executive director of the Northwest Film Forum. The camera watches the tense suburban drama from behind counters, around corners, and through a labyrinth of unpacked boxes. There's a kind of cold distance as we watch characters dissimulate and unravel through crates, down hallways, or from behind. Like any newly occupied place, Hedda's house is forbidding and alien, stripped of personality and comfort but choked with brown cardboard.
The characters play their tragedy inside well-manicured lawns of politeness. It's Ibsen's genius to expose them through neat tricks of psychological archaeology. Willis' rough camerawork makes the fear and tension more explicit, bringing out the emotional violence thrashing beneath the young middle-class relationships.
In achieving that effect, Willis has done right by Ibsen, reminding us that far from a stodgy playwright, he was a grumpy and radical man who kept a scorpion under a jar on his writing desk and was, as Willis put it, "a pain in the ass."
"In his older days, when they did his plays, he only wanted them done by young people who would fuck them around and twist them all up," Willis said. "I like to think he'd approve of what we've done."
