O Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)September 4th, 2001
O
Rated R, 91 minutes
Directed by Tim Blake Nelson
WHEN, WHERE: Now playing at the UA South
First, this is not the French erotic classic of pain and perversion, nor the Cirque du Soleil's Las Vegas fantasia of aquatic acrobatics. It's a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Othello”, with the Moorish Venetian general reimagined as an African-American basketball star at an all-white southern prep school. It belongs to a genre of classics transposed to the high school habitat of contemporary American teenagers – think "10 Things I Hate About You" (Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew"), or "Clueless" (Jane Austen's "Emma").And this is hardly a recent phenomenon, as oldies like "West Side Story" and "Your Own Thing" go to show.
Unlike Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet" and Michael Almereyda's "Hamlet", this adaptation by director Tim Blake Nelson (one of the stars of "O Brother Where Art Thou") and first-time screenwriter Brad Kaaya drops the Shakespearean language and works strictly from the plot. Odin, or O (Mekhi Phifer) is an inner city kid imported by the school's basketball program to guarantee a championship. He’s a terrific player, and a good kid, and he wins the hearts of almost everyone, not least Coach Goulding (Martin Sheen), who loves him like a son, and Desi (teen Shakespeare veteran Julia Stiles) the dean's daughter, who loves him like a lover.
The exception is Hugo (Josh Hartnett), the coach's son, who thinks he should be the object of those two affections. With icy viciousness he begins to manipulate Odin into distrust and jealousy toward the innocent and loving Desi, and as fans of the original will remember, things end badly.
Nelson's movie has a lot of positives. The young cast is all good. Phifer brings charismatic charm to a role that could probably have used a little more mystery or sense of danger. Othello is a military man, accustomed to roughness and brutality in his line of work. O's job description doesn't carry the same resumé – even on the court, he’s more Kobe Bryant than Shaquille O’Neal. But Phifer is appealing, and so is Stiles in the Desdemona role; they create a believable chemistry, though the movie would have profited from less time on the basketball court and more time developing the lovers’ characters. Still, they engage our emotions to the point that the tragic developments as the story plays out become truly affecting and horrifying. Hartnett’s Hugo/Iago is a chilling reserve of craftiness, false friendship, and heartless duplicity, and the moody, self-dramatizing voice-over he delivers sounds unnervingly like the dark broodings of a journal discovered in the aftermath of a high school shooting.
The great power of Nelson’s vision is the relevance he gives the story. Stripped of the protective insulation of classicism, this "Othello" succeeds as a heartbreaking story of adolescent violence grown out of slights and misunderstandings till it fulminates into tragedy, in a way that has become only too familiar. That same stripping, of course, denudes it of the majesty of character and language that have given Shakespeare’s version the legs to carry it over the centuries.
If these actors look a bit younger to you than you’d expect, it's because this movie was shot in 1999, before Phifer got Shafted or Hartnett hit Pearl Harbor or Stiles saved the last dance. As Nelson’s team was pushing through the final edit, the massacre at Columbine exploded, and the faint hearts at Mirimax decided it would be an imprudent moment to release a high school shooting story, even if it was based on a classic. So "O" languished on the shelf until the headlines faded and Lions Gate (the same company that relieved Miramax of the embarrassment of Kevin Smith’s irreverent "Dogma") agreed to pick up the hot potato and serve it, and a good thing, too. Despite its shortcomings, "O" is a serious, thoughtful, and moving piece of work.
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
