Note: no Fourth Friday this week, but I will have a holiday treat for y’all instead and I’m really excited about it. Watch this space!

Thanksgiving is a neglected holiday. Christmas takes up a disproportionate amount of cultural real estate, and Christmas people will accuse you of being dead inside if you mention that October feels a little early to be hearing “Santa’s Super Sleigh”1 in the grocery store. Even the Pumpkin Spice Brigade doesn’t hold the line for Thanksgiving; I feel like they lose steam after Halloween.

The cultural lopsidedness plays out in movies, too. So much discourse about what counts as a Christmas movie, but nobody’s ever talking about their favourite Thanksgiving movie.

Enter Hedda, the latest (and best) from director Nia DaCosta. I’m submitting this one for the approval of the Pumpkin Society, because it is a perfect (and decidedly family-unfriendly) Thanksgiving movie.

This adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler reimagines Hedda as a biracial “bastard” daughter of a white general, and transposes her from 1890s Norway to 1950s England. Hedda (Tessa Thompson, never better) has pressured her stodgy academic husband George (Tom Bateman) into buying a massive manor that she doesn’t want and he can’t afford. He’s up for an endowed professor position that should cover their debts and all of Hedda’s expensive whims, but she seems as ambivalent about paying those debts as she does about the house, and the husband at that. But she’s throwing him a party with all of her glamourous beatnik friends and all of his academic colleagues. She’s also invited her ex, Eileen (Nina Hoss), who shows up with a new girlfriend who can’t help but throw all of her un-Hedda-like qualities in Hedda’s face.

Right off the bat, the movie looks like Thanksgiving. It’s lit like a dream, and the autumnal colour palette is hypnotically rich: lots of deep blues, oranges, and reds. The fabrics and furnishings are so sumptuous I can practically feel them. It takes place in a big Wuthering Heights-looking manor that could be haunted, or could just be very English. Everything is just so lush. And at one point, DaCosta drops a more beautiful Spike Lee Dolly Shot than any of Spike’s, perfectly evoking what it feels like to see that one person and have something—your heart? your lust? your yen for self-destruction?—pull you towards them while the rest of the world goes blurry.

Thanksgiving can be an awkward and dramatic time. If you’re celebrating with family, you’re suddenly in proximity with people who have nothing to do with the life you chose, but a lot to do with why you chose it. Petty dramas flare up while long-running conflicts keep simmering. For a lot of us—especially us queers—the only things holding us together for the week are food, frivolity, and a favourite cousin. All of that energy is throbbing through Hedda’s bougie bacchanal, and it’s both thrilling and oddly comforting to watch.

Hedda’s husband frets with a kind of omni-directional jealousy. Her past, current, and perhaps future lovers all thrill to be in her orbit, all trying to figure out how best to elbow the others out of the way. And Hedda herself seems equally empowered and trapped by her appetites, and the spell she casts on people that makes them want to feed her. Every flirtation is an opportunity for something new and exciting, but inevitably leads to more expectations of her than fun for her. Nina was one of those new and exciting opportunities once, but that love required too much courage. Now George, who may have seemed like a chance to be free of the heedless mania of loving Nina, now comes with a stifling amount of commitment.

All of this is happening at what looks like the party of the year. Hedda is wildly melodramatic—she fills her pockets with stones and walks into the water twice within 48 hours—but her taste for melodrama makes her a damn good hostess. Open bar, hot live band, and a hostess who may set you up to fuck a sexy stranger in the hedge maze? I belong, baby. Things do escalate towards violence, as so many Thanksgiving gatherings threaten to do. But the promise of that hedge maze would make it worth it to me, personally.

Now: will Hedda make a bit of an incongruous pairing with, say, Planes, Trains and Automobiles? Yeah, sure. But incongruity is part of the Thanksgiving spirit. And Hedda is vibrant, uneasy, and messy as fuck, which is the entire Thanksgiving spirit. So add it to your holiday watchlist for when you’re feeling mischievous and moody.

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