Film Review: O (2001)

Another review I did for college. This time it was for English, as the particular film was a modernisation of Shakespeare's classic tragedy 'Othello'. But did it live up to the words left by the Bard? Or did it fall tragically short itself? Read on to find my unreliable opinion!

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...and the award for most cost-effective film title goes to… ‘O’! This is the 2001 film directed by Tim Blake Nelson and starring Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett and Julia Stiles. ‘O’ is an attempt of a modern-day reinvention of Shakespeare’s classic play ‘Othello’ (see what they did there?), replacing the settings of Venice and Cyprus with that of a high school basketball court. ‘Basketball?!’ I hear you cry, and yes, the general pretence is enough to raise a few questioning eyebrows, but as always I was determined to go into the viewing with as few preconceptions about what I was about to see as possible.

The first thing that I was quick to take note of was the aforementioned use of a basketball game to quickly establish the characters and their relationships which is, of course, the heart of a tragedy. The original characters of Othello, Iago and Cassio were military based, and although in the play we never see them in a combat situation, I got the impression that the basketball game was a translation of a battle scene that could have happened in the play, in which ‘Odin’ and ‘Michael Cassio’ (hold on a second, why didn’t Cassio get renamed? They could have called him Michelle!) take precedence over ‘Hugo’ (don’t worry, the names of the characters are just about the worst thing in the film) in the tactical aspect of the game. This is a good way of creating the tension between Hugo and the others from the outset, though it might have been a little obvious, treading on the subtlety that forms Iago’s character in the play. In the play, we don’t see why Iago does what he does, we only hear his reasons from his own mouth, so we are left in doubt as to whether they are even true. In O, we can see for ourselves that his motives are backed up by fact, which somehow takes away from how evil the character is.

From a language perspective, I was glad to hear Hugo using swears very frequently early on in the play whilst addressing Roderigo – sorry, ‘Roger’ – and thought, ‘Oh good! That’s a clever way to bring one of the language aspects of the play into the 21st century!’. In the play, Iago’s language is quite coarse by Shakespearian standards, so by throwing in swearing for the updated version of Iago, I figured that would be a good way to translate that aspect of his character over. I even dared to hope that maybe, just maybe, Odin would begin to use swearing more and more toward the end of the play to show Hugo’s influence over him! But no. Of course not. In the next scene, we see Odin (Phifer) taboo-ing his head off in the principal’s office. What a missed opportunity to do something clever with the language of the film. Not to mention, it takes away from the heroic wisdom and holier-than-thou attitude that Othello starts off with in the play.

But that’s okay, I’m willing to look past this little difference… and then we see Odin beating up Roger (Eldon Henson) in the schoolyard. This little scene was the first one to have me shaking my head in dismay. If I could grab director Tim Blake Nelson by the lapels and shake him, I would have done so, yelling in his face that the violence of Othello’s character should be conserved, without question, till the end scenes of the play. What were they thinking?! Did the makers of this film not understand the play? Did they not read it? The whole point of the story is the character’s descent from being a noble hero into a villainous murderer! What are they doing, starting off with him beating up a chubby kid?!

Okay, let me calm down for a second. Let’s look at a positive point of the film, try and forget the scene we just witnessed… well, the setting translates surprisingly well from Venice/Cyprus to an American High School. We have all the required opportunities for character interaction, we have the authoritative figures that rule over the place, just as figures such as Brobantio and Gratiano ruled over even Othello in the play. Not to mention, a side-effect of the High School atmosphere is the ‘he said, she said’ gossipy sense, which goes well with the nature of the events of the play, which can be brought down to ‘I heard she was cheating on him with him’. However, the point of the original play packing up and moving to Cyprus so early on is to remove the authority figures, allowing for the chaos to begin. The setting didn’t change in the film, so we didn’t get that sense of isolation from the outside world that gave the play an edge of unpredictability.

Getting back to the plot, we find that the religious aspect of the play has been cut out and replaced with drugs, which is a fair enough switch to make. With the massive difference in religious belief between now and then, it makes sense to remove that. The drugs, as well as being a metaphor for Hugo’s ‘poisoning’ of Odin, seem to me to represent the ‘dark side’ of modern life. Hugo begins the movie taking them, and quickly drags Odin down to his level, and this is acknowledged by his giving him the drugs. The drugs usage, as a side note, also explains what Odin was doing with all of Roger’s money, something that went relatively unexplained in the play.

A major theme of Othello was the racism, and this was something they also tried to get into O. However, the difficulty with this came from the fact that we no longer use the same words. I could see that they were trying to replace the word ‘moor’ with the word ‘nigger’, but they simply don’t mean the same thing. ‘Moor’ wasn’t always used in a derogative manner, and ‘nigger’ can never be a positive term. It was because of this fact that when Desi (Stiles) (another brilliant name change) used the word ‘nigger’ it was damaging to the relationship between her and Othello in an irreparable way, at least for me as someone who has read and understood the original play. The racism is there, as I worded my note on the matter, but it is in all the wrong places.

The music used in the film was a point of some confusion to me. I couldn’t be sure if the hip-hop/gangsta rap tone of the soundtrack was just there to make it ‘seem modern’, or if it was trying to put forth a point about Odin’s heritage, as the musical genre developed from black backgrounds. Alternatively, it could just be that they thought that was what kids listened to in High Schools, and/or it just went well with the basketball games. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the music element wasn’t something the play had, and so they could hardly translate it wrong.

I found that at least one admirable aspect of the film was the way the conversations were executed. Particularly in one scene between Odin and Hugo (Hartnett), I could trace all the ups and downs of the latter’s manipulations of the former, just the same as they were in the play. Even though the language used is different in every possible way, what is being said can be seen through this barrier, which is something nice to notice for those of us who have read the play. Staying on the topic of the character’s interactions with one another, I wasn’t sure about what they did with Hugo and Roger’s relationship. In the play, Iago manipulates Roderigo by using his charm and snake-like wit to convince him into perpetrating the acts that he does, whereas in the film he seemed to be a lot more forceful with him, which, more than anything, lessened the manipulative part of Iago’s character that we all love so much.

An interesting scene that was added into the film and was absent from the play was the ‘proposal’ between Odin and Desi (still can’t take the name seriously, I’m sorry. As an interesting side-note, Rain Phoenix, who plays Emily, is the only actress who has a more ridiculous name than her character). This ‘fake marriage’ was obviously added in to strengthen the bond between the two characters, as otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten the full impact of the deterioration of their relationship. Seeing a High School relationship falling apart is nothing compared to watching a marriage tear itself to shreds, and this is something that writer Brad Kaaya must have picked up on and tried to fix using this scene.

I think the biggest disappointment of the film was the character of Hugo, and this is not totally the fault of Hartnett (although his lingering-and-droning portrayal of the character was hardly convincing as a person that everyone in the play could trust). The motives that drove Iago in the play were, as I mentioned before, a lot less solid and more left to interpretation, and the fact that Hugo just wants his Daddy’s attention most definitely detracts from his villainy. The plan that he forms and performs in the play with such surgical accuracy and snake-like prowess seemed hasty and fell apart in the film.

To conclude, ‘O’ is most definitely not the worst film that I have reviewed (see ‘Dracula’ (1992)), and it does what it says on the box in following with a reasonable dedication the original story set out by the Bard. For someone who hasn’t read or seen the play, it is still a movie that can be watched and enjoyed, and there is enough in it and in the performances given to offer an audience a solid cinema experience. However, Shakespeare is a magic made of two halves: the intricacies and depth of the incredible stories he wove, and the beauty of the pinnacle of the English language in which he wrote them. Because of this, no matter how well the story half is translated, no modern adaptation can ever be more than half as good as the original play. Add in the general downfalls of the film, and the movie, in my opinion, amounts to no more than

My Rating:
* * *

(3/5 Stars)

- J. Boulton