A year or so ago, reviewing Miguel Almeyreda's
adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, I rhetorically asked, "Why not perform
Sophocles' Electra on a basketball court?" Now, I may have had my wish fulfilled
in a certain way. O, directed by Tim Blake Nelson, is a modern adaptation of
Shakespeare's great tragedy Othello--which was itself a stage adaptation of a
story from Giraldo Cinthio's collection of tales, the Hecatommithi (1565)--in
which the hero is an African-American basketball star at a prep school in South
Carolina.
Odin James (Mekhi Phifer) is the cynosure of all
his classmates at Palmetto Grove; his girlfriend, Desi Brable (Julia Stiles) is
a beautiful young woman; he is nearly worshipped by his coach, Duke Goulding
(Martin Sheen). But the coach's son, Hugo (Josh Hartnett), a mediocre player,
bitterly resents his father's regard for Odin. Hugo feigns to be Odin's friend
as well as teammate, and sets about contriving the destruction of his rival,
first by informing Desi's father about the affair, and then by making it appear
that Desi is betraying Odin with his friend Michael Casio (Andrew Keegan). After
the showing, I heard a couple of guys in the men's room expressing regrets about
the predictably tragic outcome of Hugo's machinations. Evidently they hadn't
read the book.
Generally speaking, I regard updated versions of
Shakespearean plays with suspicion, since they too often turn out to be
abominations like the Almeyreda production or Baz Luhrmann's Romeo+Juliet.
Actually, Othello has once before served as material for a quite successful
motion picture, George Cukor's A Double Life, for which Ruth Gordon and
Garson Kanin supplied the screenplay. The last of a series of
psychological thrillers Cukor directed in the 1940s, a meditation on the stage
as world and the world as stage, that film concerned a famous Broadway star
played by Ronald Colman who agrees to appear in a production of the tragedy and
then finds the role spilling over into his life with murderous results when he
does in a waitress with whom he has been flirting.
O is not quite in a
class with A Double Life, but the transposition to
a present day setting works very well indeed--far better than I would ever have
imagined. Othello has one of the most powerfully
effective plots of all of Shakespeare's major tragedies, and Nelson and his
collaborators have had the sense not to try improving upon it. In fact, they
have demonstrated considerable ingenuity in coming up with believable
contemporary equivalents for both the dramatis personae and the action of the
play. Moreover, unlike Messrs. Luhrmann and Almeyreda, they have had the both
the good sense and the good taste not to try inserting the highly stylized
dialogue of the original into a realistic context.
Not surprisingly, however, the characterizations have
proved a harder nut to crack. Even if Odin were Michael Jordan, mere fame
is no equivalent for the aura of greatness that surrounds Othello. Mekhi Phifer
gives a good performance but he cannot transform a basketball star into a
renowned military commander. Desdemona is even more of a problem. Although she
does not go gentle into that good night, but dies protesting her innocence, she
is nonetheless the ideal Elizabethan wife, subservient to her lord and master. Such a
figure is, of course, not so readily conceivable in the United States today. Desi thus
becomes an unwitting victim of circumstance, not a figure of tragedy.
Yet something gets lost in the process, just as it
does by
making Desi Othello/Odin's girlfriend rather than wife. No small part of the
horror of the play lies in Othello's destroying not just what he loves but
forfeiting his belief in the
possibility of marriage raised to an ideal plane. For this, O can offer no quid
pro quo. If Odin and Desi are star-crossed lovers, they are just quotidian ones,
closer kin to Bud Stamper and Deanie in Elia Kazan's If Odin and Desi are star-crossed lovers, they are just quotidian ones,
closer kin to Bud Stamper and Deanie in Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass than
to Romeo and Juliet--and even farther removed from Othello and Desdemona, who
have to deal not just with bad luck but the machinations of Iago. Splendor in the Grass than
to Romeo and Juliet--and even farther removed from Othello and Desdemona, who
have to deal not just with bad luck but the machinations of Iago. Here the movie
faces its biggest challenge, in finding an equivalent for Shakespeare's most
diabolical plotter, and it doesn't succeed in making the shot.
As portrayed by Josh Hartnett, Hugo is basically a
youthful sociopath who has discovered far too early in life how easy--and even
worse, how pleasurable--it is to manipulate people.
Before going farther, I do have to say that Hartnett's performance is
extraordinary. No one should judge
his dramatic abilities on the basis of his toothsome turn in Michael Bay's Pearl
Harbor. He and Martin Sheen--a far cry from the glamorously brooding romantic
hero once more visible on screen this summer in Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now Redux--simply walk off with the picture, and supply two indispensable
ingredients to its success. Nevertheless, Iago is not just a far cry from Hugo;
he belongs to an entirely different world.
Iago is a figure only conceivable in the
Renaissance. Confusing him with a modern screen villain would be like confusing
one of Michelangelo's heroic male nudes in the Sistine Chapel frescoes with
Arnold Schwarznegger. The Elizabethan and Jacobean drama abounds in villains,
but Iago is as unique as the great tragic heroes like Hamlet, Lear, or Macbeth.
Even Shakespeare's two most famous villains from his earlier career, Richard III
and Shylock simply pale in comparison. The one is a piece of anti-Yorkist
propaganda, and the other an anti-Semitic cliché. By contrast, Iago's
malevolence is on a cosmic scale. Nor do I think he can be explained as an
edifying illustration of man's fallen state. The great tragedies are much more
deeply rooted in pagan values than they are in
Christian ones, and Iago has more in common with Atreus than he does with
Judas Iscariot.
Immanuel Kant, in his treatises on morality such
as The Critique of Practical Reason and The Metaphysic of Morals, argued that
people should do good purely for its own sake, neither out of fear of punishment
in the hereafter not out of any possible advantage to be derived from it. Iago
pursues evil in the same disinterested fashion. At the beginning of the play,
Shakespeare tosses in some business about Iago's resentment of the Moor, who has
promoted Cassio to lieutenant over him, but I have always thought this was a sop
to satisfy the curiosity of the groundlings. Iago does not stand to gain
anything from the revenge he plots against Othello--except possibly a highly
refined if also fatal kind of aesthetic pleasure.
Iago is an artist who takes his art quite
seriously. Corrupting a simpleton like Rodrigo is child's play; only the ruin of
a truly great man can provide the spectacle Iago longs for, and only Othello is
worthy of Iago's efforts. He fashions a scheme that itself resembles the plot of
a well-crafted drama, and executes it not for the sake of his personal
aggrandizement but for its own terrifyingly destructive beauty. If Iago refuses to speak at the end of the
play, it is certainly not out of fear, but because his masterpiece is finished.
Only an inferior craftsman would botch an otherwise perfect tragedy by fooling
around with it at this point, and Iago, who is no less skilled in his art than
his creator, only needs to contemplate his creation in silence, not to comment
on it.
O's virtues are probably
ones of necessity as much as they are ones of art. The movie gets to work telling
a compelling story right away, and rarely strays from
efficiently carrying out that task for the next ninety minutes. Many
independent film makers dream of making a thriller like one of the memorable B
pictures of the late 1940s or the 1950s such as Rudolf Mate's DOA or Joseph
Lewis's Gun Crazy--and a bravura art film like Memento has more in common with
Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless or Alphaville than it does with a typical film
noir. But O, with its economical camera set ups and no-nonsense editing comes
closer to scoring that goal than any film in recent years that comes to
mind.
Note 5/30/02: O is now available on DVD from
Amazon.com
Production data courtesy of
The Internet Movie Database
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E-mail Dave:
daveclayton@worldnet.att.net