film review by Jon Reinsch

Hoop Nightmare

"O"

scheduled to show at the Metro, Pacific Place, and other area cinemas

As Shakespeare’s Othello opens, an African man and white Venetian woman have eloped. Othello is a war hero, but race sets him apart, and not everyone looks approvingly upon the marriage. Into this volatile atmosphere strides Othello’s “friend” Iago. This master manipulator sets about convincing the hero that his new wife is cuckolding him, engendering a murderous jealousy. Tim Blake Nelson has freely updated this story for his new film O.

Newly released, the film was in fact completed two years ago. If you know anything about Shakespearean tragedy, you can probably guess how things turn out. Supposed parallels with the Columbine shootings scared distributors away from releasing O until now. How dare the film be so topical!

In the play, race per se was not an issue. Shakespeare gave his hero dark skin in order to emphasize his separateness and to set up the Othello/Iago duality of pure-hearted black man / “black-hearted” white man. In O, race moves to center stage. The dramatis personae change from Venetian aristocrats and soldiers to Charleston aristocrats and high school jocks. Othello has been transformed into Odin (“O”) James, the private school’s only black student, and basketball team MVP. Iago becomes Hugo, the coach’s son.

High school was an apt choice of setting; where else would you find such extremes of passion and naivete? As for South Carolina, Nelson explains: “Place Odin on a distinctly ante-bellum campus, in a crisp school uniform, among the similarly dressed scions of former slave-owning families, and the rhetorical value is immeasurable.”

At first, race goes unmentioned—even when the dean learns that his daughter Desi and O have been seeing a lot of each other. The coach even says he loves O like his own son. One wonders, however, how much of that “love” has to do with O’s athletic prowess. Only Desi seems to genuinely appreciate O for himself—and she’s also the only one who sees even partway through Hugo.

For this retelling, Shakespeare’s language has been jettisoned. In the play, Iago says “How poor are they that have not patience!” Here, revealing that he too is an outsider, Hugo asks “Why is it that you rich shitheads never have any fuckin’ patience?” These kids use inner-city slang like they invented it. But before it’s over, we hear people O considered friends saying things like “the ghetto just popped out of him, bro” and referring to him as “the nigger.”

Evil is often more interesting than good. Thus, the emphasis here is on Hugo, who drives the action, and whose voiceovers open and close the film. On the court, Hugo’s a setup man. But off the court, he plays a mean game of one-on-one, instinctively exploiting others’ prejudice and self-doubt. He tells O: “I know you grew up in the ‘hood, so you seen plenty of hustlers, but the one thing I do know better than you is white girls, man. And white girls are snakes.” Hugo can’t express his own well-founded jealousy, but he’s discovered a power over others, and uses it to infect them with his own disease. And yet, more so than his prototype Iago, he seems genuinely shocked at the horrors he’s wrought.

These days, there are more actors behind the camera than ever before: Clint Eastwood, Sean Penn, Jodie Foster, Tim Robbins, Edward Norton, Gary Oldman, Kenneth Branagh, Liv Ullmann, and on and on. Tim Blake Nelson first joined this crowd with 1997’s Eye of God, which also concerned the meeting of an innocent with a monster. In O, he gets good work out of a cast that includes Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett, Julia Stiles, and Martin Sheen. He tells the story simply but dynamically, and some of his visual choices are suggestive, as in the out-of-focus opening shot, or a scene between Hugo and his father, shot from outside the room so that we see only Hugo.

Other than O, the only significant black character in the film is a drug dealer. At the end, O is acutely conscious that he is perceived through the filter of such stereotypes. Maybe that’s why he insists that “where I’m from didn’t make me do this.” Then who or what was responsible? Was it the “white prep-school motherfucker” Hugo, the weakness he exploits in others, or the environment in which this all takes place? It’s an environment replete with class, gender and racial distinctions. Add to that a culture that encourages kids to think of nothing outside of themselves, in which the overriding importance of something like basketball goes unquestioned, and maybe you’ve got the makings for rivalries that escalate into violence.