Susan Granger’s review of “O” (Lions Gate Films)
Timing is everything in show-business, so when this riff on “Othello,” set in an American prep school, coincided with the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, the film was shelved. Now that it’s finally been released, the royal court has been updated into a basketball court. Mekhi Phifer plays Odin, the only black student at an all-white Southern boarding school. He’s a top-notch basketball player, like a son to the coach (Martin Sheen) which evokes jealousy in Hugo (Josh Hartnett), the coach’s real son. Odin’s in love with the fair-skinned Desdemona, called Desi (Julia Stiles), the dean’s daughter. Like Shakespeare’s Iago, Hugo plants the suspicion that Desi is cheating on Odin with his best friend (Andrew Keegan) by manipulating two other students (Elden Henson, Rain Phoenix). “White girls are snakes,” the scheming Hugo hisses in Odin’s ear in this exploration of the pathology of prejudice, jealousy, bullying and youth violence. This is Julia Stiles’s third bout with Shakespearean plots (“!0 Things I Hate About You,” “Hamlet”) and she’s more than up to the task – as is Josh Hartnett (“Pearl Harbor”) who captures Hugo’s torment. Mekhi Phifer (“Clockers”) lacks their dramatic presence although he acquits himself admirably. Writer Brad Kaaya’s conceptually inventive screenplay emerges as a simplistic locker-room melodrama, totally lacking subtext while discarding the beautiful Elizabethan language. But director Tim Blake Nelson keeps the tension taut, often by having the actors whisper their lines. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “O” is a bleak, brooding 7. It’s a risk-taking concept, a serious movie aimed at teens, but this tale of race, insecurity and envy is R-rated with a brutal rape scene and a bloody finale – and that, ironically, rather defeats its purpose.
