August 31, 2001

"Movie Review | 'O': The Moor Shoots Hoops"

By ELVIS MITCHELL

So Shakespeare starts his Sonnet XVI. The distributors of "O" sought to defeat Time by simply waiting for a media storm to dissipate. Not much of a stratagem, since "O," the director Tim Blake Nelson's updating of "Othello" set in an American prep school, was made so long ago than Mekhi Phifer could still get away with playing a teenager — well, almost. Filming was completed in 1999, the same year as the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, and the picture made Miramax, the distributing company, nervous because it feared the gun violence in "O" might incite copycat gunplay.

Lions Gate is finally bringing the film to theaters. Mr. Phifer has the title role in Brad Kaaya's adaptation. In trying to make "Othello" more lifelike and bring it down to a younger audience — in effect, to make it more democratic — the adaptation has rendered the material artless. And "O" has been beaten to the punch by so many other movies that the picture feels utterly superfluous.

The title character has been christened Odin, or O, a black basketball star and an athletic scholarship recruit to an all-white private high school. A shot-caller from the floor, O is a decent guy whose status on the team provokes jealousy in the Iago figure, Hugo (Josh Hartnett), who schemes to do O in by any means necessary. That includes preying upon the stir caused by O's romantic pursuit of a white girl, Desi (Julia Stiles). "White girls are snakes, bro," Hugo whispers to Odin.

Film versions of "Othello" have provoked more than their share of controversy. The plot's racial and sexual overtones still produced an emotional boil in 1995; when the trailer for Oliver Parker's version ran before a showing of "Waiting to Exhale" at the Magic Johnson Theater in Los Angeles, I heard a black woman gasp, "I know Larry Fishburne's not about to kiss a white woman." The real shame was that even by 1995, only a few black actors had been filmed playing Shakespeare's Moor, with Mr. Fishburne one of the few to portray him in a classical movie adaptation.

Moving "Othello" to a basketball court certainly sounds more interesting than shifting "The Taming of the Shrew" to a Los Angeles-area high school, as did the makers of "10 Things I Hate About You," which also featured Ms. Stiles.

The idea of Shakespeare's mythic black man as an intimidator on the backboards makes sense. Even though many private school teams now have African-American players, such an idea is an ingenious way of making Othello's physical authority, and everyone's reaction to it, part of the drama. Some of Odin's thunder was stolen when "Finding Forrester" — which used the motif of the inner city African-American youth playing hoops at a private school as a subplot — preceded Mr. Nelson's film to the multiplexes.

Still, the concept of Othello's lording it over the guards in front of cheering crowds sounded workable. The film strains to comment on race in the way that kids can pretend to be guileless and still draw blood. (Probably the last black athlete to possess the knowing grimace of danger in a way that embodied Othello was Sonny Liston. In that drama, though, Muhammad Ali was a combination of Iago and Hotspur from "Henry IV, Part 1.")

I hoped Mr. Kaaya would use as his catalyst the outraged remarks that Isaiah Thomas made during the N.B.A. playoffs in 1988 — that black players were still thought of as instinctive while white players like Larry Bird were considered smart. Perhaps this might be a way of getting at what Kenneth Tynan once described as Othello's "concealing within him racks on which to stretch himself and those about him until the excruciated lyric cry was released; and bearing in his baggage explosive coils of taut, dangerous springs."

This colloquial adaptation has been deprived of any such texture; all the conflicts have been laid out in fairly simple terms, as if the writer was in a hurry to get to the point before the butterlike topping on the audience's popcorn congealed. The story has been shaved down so that exhibitors can fit in as many showings as possible, and one of the most important things missing from "O" is subtext. After a languorous first 40 minutes that gives time to nothing except Hugo's fixation on hawks, the picture vaults into a violent climax.

Mr. Phifer is a quick young actor but lacks the presence to dominate the screen in the way the role requires; though as an athlete he looms large, he's oblivious to his effect. (Mr. Phifer is much smaller than the high schoolers who become hoops stars nowadays; he'd be like Muggsy Bogues compared to these hormonal giants.)

Mr. Phifer seems humbled by the part — the wrong pivot, since "Othello" is about a proud man being humbled, and it was this heavyweight persona that probably affronted and roused the audiences of Shakespeare's era seeing the play for the first time. (Pro athletes are now celebrated for Othello-size bravado, even though Allen Iverson, with his quicksilver shifts of mood, seems to be playing out a variation of Othello these days.)

Odin gets to make a few forceful dunks to display his athleticism, but by that time he's so addled by Iago's influence, which includes cocaine, that the movie has long since stopped making any dramatic sense. The smaller scenes, when the tribal rites of the teenagers are examined, have a life of their own. But these moments aren't epic or particularly Shakespearean. As good as the romantic clinches between Mr. Phifer and Ms. Stiles are, audiences sitting through them may feel they've seen the actress in something with low- wattage racial tension before, namely "Save the Last Dance."

One of the biggest problems with "O" is that its volatility has been erased. Hugo's Iago motivation is that he feels he has been displaced by Odin in his own home. His cold, withdrawn father (Martin Sheen), who is also the team's coach, treats O like a son. When Odin receives the M.V.P. award, Hugo is consumed with rage, though it is never clear if he was unjustly ignored or if he is deluded about his place on the team. Either scenario would provide more dramatic motivation than eliding the point, which is what "O" does.

And we wait for the movie to deal with the way hip-hop culture has been utterly absorbed into the lives of middle-class white kids, but "O" doesn't touch on that, either.

The low-key instincts that served Mr. Nelson so well in his 1997 directorial debut, the chilling "Eye of God," help in setting a moody, anxious tone. As a director, Mr. Nelson is attracted to provocative material: the unsettling "Eye of God," about a brutal murder in the Oklahoma Bible belt, raises goose flesh that it takes weeks to lose.

"O" apparently drew him for similar reasons, but watching this picture is like arriving at a volcano a few weeks after an eruption. An adaptation of "Othello" should be a series of rumbles building up to the big conflagration. The damage here is measly by comparison.

"O" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for violence, strong language, drug use and for what Shakespeare called the beast with two backs.

O

Directed by Tim Blake Nelson; written by Brad Kaaya, based on Shakespeare's "Othello"; director of photography, Russell Lee Fine; edited by Kate Sanford; music by Jeff Danna; production designer, Dina Goldman; produced by Eric Gitter, Anthony Rhulen and Daniel L. Fried; released by Lions Gate Films. Running time: 91 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Mekhi Phifer (Odin James), Josh Hartnett (Hugo Goulding), Julia Stiles (Desi Brable), Martin Sheen (Coach Duke Goulding), Andrew Keegan (Michael Casio), Rain Phoenix (Emily) and Elden Henson (Roger).

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company


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